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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Cold War</title>
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		<title>The GOP&#8217;s Policy on Iran, ISIS, and Al-Qaeda?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/tomsears/the-gops-policy-on-iran-isis-and-al-qaeda/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-gops-policy-on-iran-isis-and-al-qaeda</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2014 05:04:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Tom Sears]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GOP]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican Party]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245680</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It's high time to tell it like it is about the “facts on the ground.”]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/is.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-245682" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/is.jpg" alt="is" width="279" height="181" /></a>Washington politicians confront new &#8220;facts on the ground&#8221; for the new Congress next year. With the Republican victory returning them to Senate control and buttressing their House majority, the new congressional leadership will face myriad urgent issues on the national security front. Numerous pre-election polls showed the burgeoning concern of voters on these issues. As ISIS and Ebola rose, they witnessed crises literally spanning US borders: from a surge of immigrants from Latin America to jihadist-inspired attacks in Oklahoma, New York and across the northern border with Canada.</p>
<p>Democrat attempts to address these threats have ranged from the ever-shifting &#8220;protocols&#8221; and &#8220;self-quarantine&#8221; guidance of the CDC to “executive amnesty” for millions of illegals&#8212;an unsurprising hodge-podge of responses given the Obama Administration’s perpetual state of political correctness.</p>
<p>That state must be broken if America hopes to address and resuscitate its national security posture. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union (precipitated by the fall of the Berlin Wall, which saw its 25th anniversary last week), the United States has lacked an ordering principle in its foreign and national security policy. Unnecessary, many would answer, with the collapse of the world&#8217;s only other superpower, and its one-party totalitarianism (i.e., Soviet Communism).</p>
<p>While generally atheistic in its implementation historically, communism nonetheless embraced the notion of its inevitable triumph&#8212;bourgeois and capitalist societies would collapse from the pressure of their “internal contradictions.” In this regard, communism was not unlike many other religious faiths. Its tenets promised the ultimate victory of “the proletariat” in realizing the utopian vision of a “classless” society. And in practically all communist countries, these tenets are not optional.</p>
<p>Among today&#8217;s threats, as they pertain to or intersect with radical Islamic and jihadist groups, organizations or nations, America has not reached the clarity and purpose that it attained while confronting and defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War. In order to address our present daunting challenges, and surely those we are yet to confront, the perspective of the American public on this account <em>must</em> be changed. The Obama Administration, in its anti-war, &#8220;lead from behind&#8221; policies, has thoroughly demonstrated not only its resistance to any such effort, but its dedication to an attitude of moral equivalency toward adversaries.</p>
<p>Today’s radical Islamists embrace their own totalitarian ideology. They seek the subjugation of the non-Muslim world in pursuit of a <em>caliphate </em>(a principal objective of ISIS, for instance&#8212;Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), which basically amounts to a nation governed by the doctrine of <em>sharia, </em>or simply stated, Islamic law. ISIS and similar radical organizations (and in the case of Iran, a present-day state) brook no dissent. They have little to no respect for Western notions of human rights or freedom of expression (for instance, brutally repressing women and <em>executing</em> homosexuals and <em>infidels</em>&#8212;non-Muslims).</p>
<p>The threat of Iran, ISIS, Al-Qaeda and associated Muslim radicals represents the same danger that communism did a generation ago. These totalitarian Islamists in their ultimate objectives present an ideological threat every bit as dangerous and existential as that posed by the Soviets to the West, and particularly the United States, during the Cold War. Americans may not know much about ISIS and <em>sharia</em> right now, but they expect their government to protect them. Republicans will be wise to begin speaking plainly about the source of America’s unease with these radicals and the <em>enduring</em> threat they pose. These enemies are committed, they are ambitious, and they mean to defeat us. If Republicans fail in naming these enemies and mustering the national will to confront them, their fortunes at the ballot box will prove trivial in the face of this ascendant religious tyranny. The GOP needs to start telling it like it is about these “facts on the ground.”</p>
<p><em>Tom Sears is the executive director of the &#8220;Center for Military Readiness&#8221; and a member of Andrew McCarthy&#8217;s &#8220;Benghazi Accountability Coalition.&#8221;</em></p>
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		<title>Media Diversionary Tactics in Ferguson and Gaza</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/william-kilpatrick/media-diversionary-tactics-in-ferguson-and-gaza/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=media-diversionary-tactics-in-ferguson-and-gaza</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/william-kilpatrick/media-diversionary-tactics-in-ferguson-and-gaza/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Sep 2014 04:11:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[William Kilpatrick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ferguson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Media]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239819</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ISIS takes note.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/mk.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239956" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/mk.jpg" alt="mk" width="323" height="181" /></a><strong>[To order William Kilpatrick’s new book, <em>Insecurity</em>, click <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Insecurity-William-Kilpatrick-ebook/dp/B00KO8ZERC#reader_B00KO8ZERC">here</a>.]</strong></p>
<p>We hear a lot from the media about Israel’s disproportionate response to attacks from Hamas, but it may be time to focus on the media’s own disproportionate response to certain events.</p>
<p>Take the incident of the missing Malaysian airliner. Big story? Yes. But CNN’s decision to give it round-the-clock coverage for two solid months seems a little excessive, until you remember that there was an even bigger story unfolding around the same time—the Russian takeover of Crimea. The annexation of Crimea, the threat to the rest of Ukraine, and the possible re-ignition of the Cold War was a major historical event. It was also bad news for the Obama administration and its narrative that relations with Russia had been reset, tranquility had been established, and our military could be safely scaled back. It is in that context that CNN’s decision to refocus our attention to the possible whereabouts of the airliner should be understood.</p>
<p>The media’s current focus on the shooting of a black teenager by a white policeman in Ferguson, Missouri seems also designed to divert attention away from the big picture. The story provides an opportunity to shift the spotlight away from a number of other stories that reflect badly on the current administration—the failure of Obama’s Iraq policy, the inability to control the southern border, the IRS scandal, the President’s serial vacations, and the possibility of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. One might justifiably conclude that much of the media attention to Ferguson is fueled by ulterior motives.</p>
<p>By focusing on Ferguson, the media (with CNN once again playing a lead role) managed to blow it up into a much bigger story than it might otherwise have been. All that business about the IRS and the Mexican border suddenly faded from sight. And even though the coverage focused on the death of a young black American, it still managed to draw attention away from the major risk to young black Americans, in favor of a narrative which suggests that white racism is the root cause of black troubles. According to the established formula, America has never overcome the heritage of its “troubled racist past,” blacks are still the victims of unjust discrimination, and black youth live in constant fear of white police.</p>
<p>While that narrative was still valid in the fifties and sixties, it is now well past its expiration date. In Chicago this past weekend, seven people were killed and twenty-nine others wounded due to gun violence. All of the victims were black—most of them young. This is about par for a weekend in Chicago. And similar incidences of black-on-black violence occur every week in Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Atlanta, and New York—not to mention St. Louis, which is right next door to Ferguson. Many of the most violent cities have black mayors, black city councilmen, and black police chiefs. That’s a bit inconvenient for the press because it doesn’t fit into the white racism narrative, but the media stick to their story nonetheless. Yet the causes of black violence have been extensively studied by sociologists and criminologists, and they have been telling us for decades that the root cause is the breakdown of the black family due to high rates of illegitimacy.</p>
<p>If the mainstream media people were as concerned as they profess to be about the lives of young blacks, we would see numerous TV specials about the black family crisis, and instead of sending platoons of reporters and cameramen to Ferguson, CNN would dispatch them to cover the daily mayhem in Chicago. But that would require revising and updating the narrative that has served the media so well, and that, apparently, is just too much trouble.</p>
<p>Not only is the narrative about white racism dishonest, it’s destructive. It encourages grievances, keeps racial tensions alive, and perpetuates violent behavior. In short, the media’s favored formula is a self-fulfilling prophecy that only serves to guarantee a more polarized society.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the media’s distortion of the Ferguson affair does serve one useful purpose. It alerts us to the possibility that other stories are being handled in the same unbalanced way. The biggest story in the world today is the resurgence of Islam. And by-and-large, that story is being managed in the same dishonest fashion.</p>
<p>Which brings us back to the point where we started—the media’s lopsided attention to Israel’s supposedly disproportionate response to Hamas. The similarities to the media’s handling of the Ferguson situation are hard to miss. Some of the same reporters who were embedded in Gaza are now embedded in Ferguson. The media’s concern over innocent civilians in Gaza has now shifted to an innocent teenager in Missouri. And just as the blame for the troubles in Gaza is assigned to the disproportionate Israeli response, the problems in Ferguson and elsewhere are blamed on disproportionate encounters between well-armed cops and unarmed youth. The narrative is also the same. According to the media’s one-size-fits-all explanation, both rockets fired from Gaza and projectiles hurled at Ferguson store windows are caused by poverty and institutional oppression.</p>
<p>Moreover, in both cases, the media is being played like a violin—in Missouri by professional race-baiters and grievance-mongers, in Gaza by Palestinian propagandists who seem more media-savvy than the media itself, and who are adept at staging fake atrocity photo-ops which they know will be obligingly transmitted to TV screens across the world. Just as riots in Missouri feed on media attention, so does violence in Palestine.</p>
<p>But why, exactly, is Palestine given so much attention?</p>
<p>The other, and most irresponsible, aspect of the media’s disproportionate coverage is that in both cases, the stories are used to keep the public’s eye off the larger picture. The larger story that is being kept off-stage in Ferguson is the breakdown of the black family. The larger story in the Israeli-Hamas conflict is that the root cause of the troubles is Islam itself. You might prefer to say that the trouble lies in a violent and anti-Semitic interpretation of Islam, but that interpretation is now widespread. As I <a href="http://www.realclearreligion.org/articles/2014/08/09/when_christians_blame_israel.html">wrote recently</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>Muslims are attacking non-Muslims in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Kenya, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, the Ivory Coast, Mali, Libya, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, the Philippines, and Thailand. There are no Jews to speak of in these places. So you can’t blame the violence on them. Given the propensity of Muslims to attack their neighbors, what are the chances that in the one place on earth where a Jewish government and an Islamist government are in conflict, it’s the Jews who are largely at fault?</p></blockquote>
<p>The media coverage of jihadist activities in most of the above-mentioned places is minimal. So also is the coverage of Muslim attacks on Jews in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, England, and Australia. Nor will you hear much about the rocks, bottles, bricks, and Molotov cocktails thrown during the numerous Muslim riots in the EU and UK.</p>
<p>Likewise, just as the media avoids telling the story of black-on-black violence, it rarely focuses on the fact that the vast majority of Muslim deaths worldwide are caused by other Muslims. To do so would undermine the established narrative that Islam is a religion of peace and justice.</p>
<p>Thus, the obsessive concentration on Israel and Hamas. And thus, when the media does attend to hard-to-ignore cases of Islamic jihad, they are forced to pretend that each occurrence is an unusual departure from true Islam. For example, reporters treat the atrocities committed by ISIS—the beheadings, the sex slavery, the forced conversions, the payment of the <em>jizya</em>—as though they were exotic new phenomena, when, in fact, they were all integral elements of Islamic expansion for more than twelve hundred years.</p>
<p>When you step back from the Israel-Hamas conflict to get a broader view, you notice that groups like Hamas, ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda, and Al-Shabaab not only have much in common with each other, they share in a common heritage and a common devotion to Islam. The media, however, is trapped in a narrative that says otherwise. Hence, the need to put the onus on Israel. The thought that the violence emanating from Gaza is part of a worldwide movement to re-establish a seventh-century theocracy is a thought they dare not entertain.</p>
<p>Americans, including many black Americans, are catching on to the game the media is playing with race relations in America. Let’s hope that they will soon catch on to the very similar game being played in the Middle East.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2728624/How-democracy-treating-guys-ISIS-militants-social-media-encourage-Ferguson-protesters-embrace-Islamic-extremism.html"><em>Daily Mail</em></a> reports that “ISIS militants and their supporters are using social media to encourage protesters in Ferguson to embrace radical Islam and fight against the U.S. government.” Ironically, the jihadist social media campaign to win over black Americans relies on the very same narrative pushed by the mainstream media. According to a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/08/21/even-islamist-fighters-in-syria-and-iraq-are-obsessing-over-ferguson/"><em>Washington Post</em></a> article, “One argument they’ve been making for years is that racism and discrimination are rampant in some parts of the West, and they’re hoping the Ferguson riots could help recruit black Americans.” According to one fan of the Islamic State interviewed for the piece, “In Islam there is no racism, and we think black people will wake up and follow the example of Malcolm X…” Some social media users put the matter more bluntly. One typical message reads: “Blacks in #Ferguson, there’s an alternative to this indignity: pick yourselves up with Islam, like #IS in #Iraq.”</p>
<p>Now that the media’s dishonest narrative has been picked up by ISIS and friends, it’s high time for them to reconsider the dangerous game they have been playing.</p>
<p><strong>William Kilpatrick is the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Christianity-Islam-Atheism-Struggle-Soul/dp/158617696X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1405380125&amp;sr=1-2&amp;keywords=Christianity%2C+Islam+and+Atheism"><em>Christianity, Islam, and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West</em></a>. His work is supported in part by the Shillman Foundation.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Case for Peace in Our Time</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/the-case-for-peace-in-our-time/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-case-for-peace-in-our-time</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 03 Jul 2014 04:48:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Angelo M. Codevilla]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peace]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Roosevelt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[To Make and Keep Peace Among Ourselves and with All Nations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[WWII]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235474</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[But will the American ruling class give peace a chance?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/51lKW4N7eLL.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235475" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/51lKW4N7eLL-233x350.jpg" alt="51lKW4N7eLL" width="179" height="269" /></a>Angelo M. Codevilla, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ourselves-Nations-Hoover-Institution-Publication/dp/0817917144"><i>To Make and Keep Peace Among Ourselves and with All Nations, </i></a>Hoover Institution Press, 2014, 209 pages, $24.95.</strong></p>
<p>The title derives from Abraham Lincoln, a noble proclamation that Angelo Codevilla finds for the most part unfulfilled. As the author notes, during the past 100 years in America peace prevailed in only two brief periods, from 1919-1941 and 1992-2001. As Codevilla sees it, peace is not only in short supply but positively endangered. Given the dynamics in play, outlined here in considerable detail, that should come as no surprise.</p>
<p>As the “precondition for enjoying the good things of life,” peace must be statecraft’s objective. The author charts Pericles and the war-weary Athenians, the Romans, and other lessons from history that will be of interest to scholars and statesmen alike. But <i>To Make and Keep Peace</i> speaks to all and deserves the broadest possible readership.</p>
<p>Angelo Codevilla, professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University, is well aware that peace has enemies, among them pacifism and the type of progressive ideology dating from Woodrow Wilson. That progressivism “has become orthodoxy” and features “a pacifism as mindless as it was frenetic and provocative,” deployed by a “united ruling class intoxicated with its own virtue and ideology.”</p>
<p>The author cites president Franklin Roosevelt’s Sept 3, 1939 speech, which came after the Munich Pact, after the Stalin-Hitler Pact, after the invasion of Poland, and after the outbreak of WWII. Yet, the villain remained impersonal, “force itself,” and no nation threatened America any more than any other. Only on December 29, 1940, after fall of France, did FDR specifically indict “the Nazi masters of Germany.” But the willful blindness did not end there.</p>
<p>For Codevilla, “no illusions were greater nor proved more fateful than those about the Soviet Union.”  Affection for the Soviet Union and Communism “deformed US foreign policy, caused WWII to end not in peace but in Cold War, and occasioned conflict among Americans the consequences of which are with us yet.” The ruling class blend of gentry and intellectuals “believed that Stalin was the <i>sine qua non</i> of perpetual peace through the United Nations,” and that “staying on his good side was job #1.”</p>
<p>The Rooseveltians “debased America’s cause by identifying it with Stalin’s.” They treated the USSR’s partnership in starting the war as a non-event and  “by using the totalitarian tactic of airbrushing to try justifying their Soviet affections, they poisoned American political life.” The ruling-class consensus was, in effect, to facilitate the Soviet Union’s hold on their empire. In that climate, Americans of the “we win, they lose” view of the Cold War, in the style of Ronald Reagan, came to be regarded as enemies of peace. Codevilla marshals evidence that Senator Edward Kennedy offered to cooperate with the Soviets to defeat such Americans.</p>
<p>By then the ruling class, “had doubled down on its Wilsonian sense of intellectual-moral entitlement” and “came to regard its domestic political opponents as perhaps the principle set of persons whose backward ways must be guarded against and reformed.” Therefore, the author says, a loss of peace abroad feeds domestic strife and results in a loss of peace at home.</p>
<p>Other Wilsonians, “were anti-anti-Communists,” who wanted America engaged in the Cold War, “but on the other side.” This “New Left thinking” eventually spread throughout America’s foreign policy establishment.</p>
<p>President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed that there was no victory in Vietnam for anybody. The strategy was socio-economic “nation building” and the enemies were poverty, ignorance, and disease. The Communists “learned that US manpower does not matter so long as Americans fight without a serious plan for defeating or destroying the enemy.” That, says Codevilla, remains the US government’s default approach and “generates contempt and violence against America.”</p>
<p>These dynamics are also in play in America’s conflict with Islamic civilization, which “had been the West’s biggest problem from eighth century until 1683” when Poland’s king Jan Sobieski turned back the Muslims at the gates of Vienna. “Now the problem is back,” explains Codevilla, and “our culturally, historically illiterate ruling class missed the fact that a whole civilization mobilized against America.”</p>
<p>The seizure of the U.S. embassy in Iran in 1979 was an act of war but drew the response of a “minor irritation.” The Islamic world “learned that it was now safe to export its warfare to the West in general and America in particular.” Codevilla finds it no coincidence that “former anti-anti-Communists were now anti-anti-Muslim.” And as during the Cold War, the “progressives” blamed America’s troubles on their fellow citizens. President Barack Obama embodies that dynamic like no other, along with historical illiteracy.</p>
<p>The president is on record that “Islam has always been a part of America’s history,” which Codevilla describes as “the reverse of the truth.” And with the president, staying on the good side of Islamic militants appears to be job one. At the UN, Codevilla notes, Obama condemned in equal terms Americans who insult Muslims and Muslims who burn and kill Americans. And he called for imprisonment of the man who made the anti-Muslim video that Muslim leaders saw “as good cause for anti-American violence.”</p>
<p>Codevilla is right about that but could have explored this theme further. The President of the United States and the Secretary of State essentially parroted the propaganda of jihadists. It is as though in 1961 President John F. Kennedy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk had agreed with East German Communist bosses that the Berlin Wall was indeed the “Antifascist Protection Rampart” and offered to help keep Germans imprisoned in a Stalinist state.</p>
<p>The menace abroad, meanwhile, is not terrorism but “extremism” and homeland security is directed against “all citizens equally rather than against plausible enemies.” This fateful error, says Codevilla, “gave civil strife’s deadly spiral its first deadly turn.” And for the ruling class, extremism is embodied in their political opponents, “the conservative side of American life.”</p>
<p>As the author shows, “The FBI infiltrates the Tea Party as it once did the Communist Party – agent of the Soviet Union that it was.” President Obama called “enemies of democracy” the very groups the IRS subjected to punitive audits. Vice President Biden and the Senate majority leader called them “terrorists.” Readers will easily verify that those in charge use every opportunity “to direct blame, distrust, and even mayhem onto those they like the least.” In these conditions Americans “must learn to trust each other less than ever, while trusting the authorities ever more, forever.” Or will it be forever?</p>
<p>“Peace among ourselves and with all nations has to be won and preserved as it ever has been here and elsewhere,” contends the author. Codevilla hopes for new statesmen who will secure the respect of other nations and understand that wars are to be “avoided or won quickly.” Those responsible for terrorism should be held responsible, but “the longer we wait, the more force will be needed.” Since nuclear weapons are easily obtained, Codevilla argues, we need the best missile defense. We won’t get that from the man now running the show.</p>
<p>In 2012, Codevilla notes, “President Barack Obama communicated to Russia confidentially that, after his expected reelection, he would forswear missile defenses more thoroughly than before, previous commitments notwithstanding.” The president came through on that one, but it did not make for peace among ourselves or with all nations.</p>
<p>Terrorists and tyrants are getting the message that the time to act is now. The “domestic state of siege” is unlikely to lighten up along with attacks on those “on the conservative side.”  So it’s probably true that, as Angelo Codevilla says in the early going, “We cannot know whether America can ever live in peace again, what kind of peace we may win for ourselves, or what peace we may end up having to endure.”</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Putin&#8217;s Obama Game</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/putins-obama-game/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=putins-obama-game</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 23 Apr 2014 04:21:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A Russian thugocrat outwits and humiliates a Radical-in-Chief over and over again.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/obama-putin.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-223942" alt="obama putin romney" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/obama-putin-450x270.jpg" width="315" height="189" /></a>Epic Fail.</p>
<p>That would be a generous way to describe Obama’s consistent foreign policy failures – and currently, most dangerously with Russia, where we see the highest-level of tensions since the end of the Cold War.</p>
<p>While Obama is an uber-arrogant failure, so many wise people have recognized the errors of his ways.  Take Nile Gardiner, Ph.D., Jack Spencer, Luke Coffey and Nicolas Loris, who recently wrote that,</p>
<blockquote><p>“The failure of the Obama Administration’s Russian &#8216;reset,&#8217; the unilateral disarming of Europe, and the U.S. reduction of forces and disengagement from Europe have led Russia to calculate that the West will not respond in any significant way.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Simply, as they continued,</p>
<blockquote><p>“The Obama Doctrine has been a monumental failure because it fails to protect and advance U.S. interests. It is the antithesis of Ronald Reagan’s bold approach, which was based on powerful American leadership on the world stage, including a willingness to stand up firmly to America’s adversaries. Perhaps even worse, many of America’s traditional allies are questioning America’s resolve with respect to transatlantic relations and NATO’s security guarantee.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Kim Zigfeld is right saying,</p>
<blockquote><p>“Obama promised us that in exchange for appeasement we’d get Russian help reining in Iran. What we actually got was Russian opposition to U.S. interests, not just in Iran but throughout the Middle East, from Libya to Syria.”</p></blockquote>
<p>While Obama is so soft on foreign policy, he is harsh with those in America who disagree with him – as Morgan Brittany, the actress and political commentator said,</p>
<blockquote><p>“It seems that the Obama administration and the Democrats like Harry Reid are hell-bent on persecuting, harassing and demonizing American citizens while foreign dictators, aggressors and terrorists get little, if any pushback.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Undoubtedly, Putin is a <a href="http://www.5wpr.com/about5wpr/management.cfm">public relations genius;</a> his popularity is at an all-time high. The man also wisely utilizes both foreign and domestic media.<i> (</i>Who can forget that Putin wrote a September 2013 op-ed in the New York Times, which urged the American people to oppose a U.S. initiative for military strikes in Syria &#8212; and his mission succeeded.<i>)</i></p>
<p>And meanwhile, as Steve Huntley notes,</p>
<blockquote><p>“Obama has done little to mobilize public opinion, mostly confining himself to public warnings to Putin, with little effect. Putin annexed Crimea, had his troops overwhelm Ukrainian forces there and massed Russian soldiers along Ukraine’s eastern border, raising fears of a further invasion.”</p></blockquote>
<p>While Putin continues to win the media war, in the last few days, he has threatened to start charging Ukraine in advance for natural gas supplies, and he continues to justify Russia&#8217;s military action to foreign media &#8212; as his troops move forward in Ukraine. This is not a surprise for a man who has said that the collapse of the Soviet empire &#8220;was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.&#8221; Putin is winning the media war, which makes it much harder for world leaders to stand up to him.</p>
<p>Similarly, one must not forget that Putin has a keen understanding of the importance of foreign media. He wrote a September 2013 op-ed in the New York Times, which urged the American people to oppose a U.S. initiative for military strikes in Syria &#8212; and his mission succeeded.  It was a stroke of genius arranging for Edward Snowden to call-in to a recent press conference. Putin does a strong job of sending the message that he is a valiant protector of Russian honor against American interference – and Putin is playing chess – and winning on issues large and small, including Edward Snowden, Syria, and Iran.</p>
<p>Obama <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/ronn-torossian-russia-ukraine/2014/03/01/id/555497/">foolishly said</a> only a month ago that, “our approach in the United States is not to see these as some Cold-War chessboard in which we&#8217;re in competition with Russia.&#8221;</p>
<p>As Senator John McCain has rightfully noted, Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to succeed in having &#8220;played us so incredibly.&#8221; And as Ambassador John Bolton affirms: &#8220;Putin at this point holds all the high cards — and all we have from the president is rhetoric.&#8221;</p>
<p>Putin is playing America – and Obama is dazed, confused and clueless. It is painful and simply sickening to watch.</p>
<p>Watching the recent press conference where Putin spoke about the need to first marry off his ex-wife before discussing “a new first lady,” I couldn’t help but think if he would marry someone who said – as did Obama’s wife, that “People in this country are ready for change and hungry for a different kind of politics and … for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country…”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/taunting-obama/">Putin regularly is taunting Obama</a>.</p>
<p>Are the Obamas now proud of this America? There has never been a time America has had less respect in the world.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>In Obama’s Era, What Would Ronald Reagan Do?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/in-obamas-era-what-would-ronald-reagan-do/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=in-obamas-era-what-would-ronald-reagan-do</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 24 Feb 2014 05:15:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Ronald Reagan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ukraine]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219509</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Words of wisdom for uncertain times. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Ronald-Reagan.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219510" alt="NA.0210.Reagan37" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Ronald-Reagan-391x350.jpg" width="274" height="245" /></a>Ronald Reagan was one of the greatest President the United States has ever had, an American hero.  From preserving American honor worldwide, to lowering tax rates, standing for limited government and free enterprise, he led this great nation with truth, justice, freedom and prosperity. As we live through the Obama Administration, we might as ourselves, “What Would Ronald Reagan Do?” and look to Reagan for answers.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As we witness the chaos in Ukraine, Reagan was so firmly on the side of the good guys, and as he said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children&#8217;s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As a small business owner, how I wish this Administration would say, as Reagan did in 1983: “Small business is the gateway to opportunity for those who want a piece of the American dream. [...] Well, wouldn&#8217;t it be nice to hear a little more about the forgotten heroes of America-those who create most of our new jobs, like the owners of stores down the street; the faithfuls who support our churches, synagogues, schools, and communities; the brave men and women everywhere who produce our goods, feed a hungry world, and keep our families warm while they invest in the future to build a better America? That&#8217;s where miracles are made, not in Washington, D.C.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ronn-torossian/">Ronn Torossian, CEO of 5WPR</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> echo these very words for me and my family – and it&#8217;s why so often I </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/author/ronn-torossian/">write here at Front Page Magazine</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> and elsewhere – American government today is too involved in our lives. As Ronald Reagan said in a nationally televised address on July 6, 1976: “I&#8217;m convinced that today the majority of Americans want what those first Americans wanted: A better life for themselves and their children; a minimum of government authority. Very simply, they want to be left alone in peace and safety to take care of the family by earning an honest dollar and putting away some savings. This may not sound too exciting, but there is something magnificent about it. On the farm, on the street corner, in the factory and in the kitchen, millions of us ask nothing more, but certainly nothing less than to live our own lives according to our values — at peace with ourselves, our neighbors and the world.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As Obama continues to expand American government, he missed the Reagan memo that indeed Americans wish for liberty for “The dreams of people may differ, but everybody wants their dreams to come true. And America, above all places, gives us the freedom to do that. I&#8217;m convinced that today the majority of Americans want what those first Americans wanted: A better life for themselves and their children; a minimum of government authority.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">There are so many great quotes from this charismatic orator on the need to limit government, including “Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other,” or “I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There&#8217;s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: as government expands, liberty contracts.&#8221;  Paying 55% taxes as a New York resident, how I wish someone today in government would stand up and say, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, &#8216;I&#8217;m from the government and I&#8217;m here to help.&#8217;&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As the government continues to intrude on American lives, with threats to monitor newsrooms, and continuing intruding in our affairs, Reagan’s writing in 1975 could be written ad naseum today: “There are those in America today who have come to depend absolutely on government for their security. And when government fails they seek to rectify that failure in the form of granting government more power. So, as government has failed to control crime and violence with the means given it by the Constitution, they seek to give it more power at the expense of the Constitution. But in doing so, in their willingness to give up their arms in the name of safety, they are really giving up their protection from what has always been the chief source of despotism — government. Lord Acton said power corrupts. Surely then, if this is true, the more power we give the government the more corrupt it will become.”</span></p>
<p>Let us all hope and pray as Reagan said in 1992 at the Republican National Convention that “America&#8217;s best days are yet to come. Our proudest moments are yet to be. Our most glorious achievements are just ahead.” What is right today is following Reagan’s legacy, for “They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.”  Truly today, there can be no question that “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”</p>
<p>Americans must do all we can to adopt Reagan’s work ethic, leadership, and optimism and do what we can to remain sane in a time when American leadership is taking us down a bad path.</p>
<p>God Bless America.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Cold War Rematch in Kiev</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/cold-war-rematch-in-kiev/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=cold-war-rematch-in-kiev</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Feb 2014 05:53:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[european union]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kiev]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219250</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[With Obama at the helm, this time the outcome may be different. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/7982c905b8c9419f8f238d746ee77b7a.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219267" alt="APTOPIX Ukraine Protests" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/7982c905b8c9419f8f238d746ee77b7a-450x340.jpg" width="315" height="238" /></a>In a striking example of Cold War redux, the Ukraine has emerged as the latest geopolitical flashpoint between Russia and the United States, with Western Europe playing a secondary role. Ukrainians are caught in a tug of war, with Ukrainians in the eastern portion of Ukraine more aligned with Russia, and Ukrainians in the western portion of the country wanting to move closer to the democratic model of Western Europe and the United States. Protesters against the repressive government of Ukraine’s President Viktor F. Yanukovych are fighting for more freedoms within the structure of a pluralistic democracy, including checks on presidential powers. With the likely tacit blessing of autocratic Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is no stranger to using force to put down dissent, Yanukovych’s government has pushed back with increasingly repressive measures. These measures now include empowering the military to search, detain and shoot protesting Ukrainian freedom fighters as part of what the government is calling a nationwide anti-terrorism operation.</span></p>
<p>Protests in Ukraine began last November when Ukraine’s President Viktor F. Yanukovych decided to reject offers of a closer relationship and trade deal with the European Union, tilting towards Russia instead. Russia offered Ukraine an economic lifeline in the form of $15 billion dollars’ worth of credit, and put pressure on Yanukovych to rebuff Western Europe’s offers. After suspending its credit line briefly after the resignation under pressure of pro-Russian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov in January, Russia has now resumed its extension of credit with the purchase of $2 billion in Ukrainian government bonds. Russia took this action shortly after Yanukovych had met with Putin in Sochi on the sidelines of the Winter Olympics opening ceremonies, and just one day before this week’s bloodiest clashes yet broke out in the capital city of Kiev.</p>
<p>In the worst outbreak of violence so far in the stand-off between protesters and Ukraine President Yanukovych’s government, at least two dozen people have been reported killed and hundreds injured during clashes that began on Tuesday February 18th. Fires set by protesters raged in Kiev as the protesters tried to stave off police assaults, which had begun when police officers in two armored personnel carriers attempted to ram through barriers set up by the protesters. The protesters pushed back, resulting in the vehicles bursting into flames. Riot police then came out in force, prompting protesters to burn tires and whatever else they could to create a fiery barricade around their principal encampment on Independence Square. The police continued their assaults into the morning hours of February 19th. The protesters, though badly battered, are not giving up just yet. Lawmakers in one region declared independence from Yanukovych’s government, in support of the protesters.</p>
<p>Only a few days ago, there was optimism that peace would be restored as a result of an agreement by representatives of the opposition to have protesters abandon their occupation of government buildings in return for amnesty from prosecution. Putin’s response to this prospect of more concessions by Yanukovych, and to a meeting this past Monday of protest leaders with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to request assistance, was his decision to resume providing credit to Ukraine. The pro-Moscow government supporters in Ukraine’s Parliament followed up Putin’s action with actions of their own favorable to Russia’s interests. They blocked attempts by opposition leaders to reform Ukraine’s constitution towards a more Western style model with reduced presidential powers. That is when all hell broke loose. The result was the “pyre of violent chaos,” as the <i>New York Times</i> described this week’s bloody clashes.</p>
<p>The <i>New York Times</i> front page article on February 19<sup>th</sup> linked Yanukovych’s meeting with Putin in Sochi with Yanukovych’s apparent reversal of his earlier pledges not to use force to disband the protesters. After all, Putin’s own hold on power is a clear demonstration of how force and repression are more reliable tools in the hands of an autocrat than giving in to the demands of freedom fighters.</p>
<p>Russia wasted no time accusing the United States of interfering in the internal affairs of its neighbor and fomenting discord. Washington is trying to tell &#8220;the authorities of a sovereign state what they should do next and how they should do it,&#8221; declared a Russian state-owned news agency. The Foreign Ministry in Moscow blamed the escalation of violence on Western politicians’ “policy of connivance.” Only a few days ago, before the latest outbreak, a leading Russian Foreign Ministry official had said that the United States was displaying an attitude of “puppeteering” by trying to impose a “Western vector of development” on Ukraine.</p>
<p>These charges took on extra urgency in Russian circles as a result of the leak (most likely by Russia itself, obtained from its surveillance) of the infamous audio recording of a phone conversation between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt. While Nuland’s expletive denunciation of the European Union revealed the Obama administration’s impatience with the European Union’s failure to deal adequately with the crisis in Ukraine brewing in Western Europe’s own backyard, the recording also revealed discussions between Nuland and Pyatt regarding whom should and should not serve in a new government. Russia has used this conversation as proof that its suspicions of U.S. meddling in the internal affairs of Ukraine are well-founded.</p>
<p>Russia has a significant stake in what happens to Ukraine. It shares a border with Ukraine, which heightens Russia’s national security concerns if Ukraine were to integrate economically and militarily with the West rather than turn towards Russia for support. Ukraine is also of commercial significance to Russia, both in terms of providing pipeline transit for energy Russia sells to Europe and providing access to the sea for its maritime export trade.</p>
<p>During several centuries up to the dismantling of the Soviet Union, Russia has been able to exercise control at various times over at least some portions of Ukraine. Putin, who admires Stalin as a leader, is trying to re-build a mini version of Russia’s former empire at least in what has been called the &#8220;near abroad&#8221; of former neighboring Soviet satellites. This would bring Ukraine back squarely into Russia’s sphere of influence.</p>
<p>Western European countries have expressed support for the opposition in Ukraine, while calling for restraint. They have also threatened sanctions against government officials responsible for the crackdown, but have not followed through, at least up until now. A concrete financial aid package for Ukraine outbidding Russia’s extension of credit has also not yet been forthcoming. Some of this might change as a result of the latest bloody clashes and Yanukovych’s evident determination to suppress the protests with a major display of force. However, as the recorded conversation of Assistant Secretary of State Nuland with Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt made clear, the Obama administration is not willing to let the European Union take the lead even though Germany in particular has more energy and economic interests at stake than the United States does.</p>
<p>The United States’ interest in Ukraine has little to do with energy or trade, in my opinion. Concern for the human rights of protesters fighting for greater freedoms may be part of what is driving some members of the Obama administration to seek greater involvement in the crisis. However, there may well be a more realpolitik strategy at work as well.</p>
<p>The Obama administration may be trying to resurrect a Cold War strategy to counter the Soviet Union championed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor whom has served as a senior adviser to President Obama on matters of national security and foreign policy. Brzezinski believed in exploiting the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union in the lead-up to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan during the Carter years, by which he meant at the time to stir up opposition within and nearby the Soviet Union among the Muslim population to weaken the Soviet state through implosion.  In Afghanistan, which had a pro-Soviet government at the time, Brzezinski’s idea was to funnel U.S. aid to the Muslim opposition in order to suck the Soviet Union into a costly war in Afghanistan that he believed would help demoralize the Soviet Union and lead to its break-up.</p>
<p>The following is an exchange between Brzezinski and an interviewer for Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998, as published by the <a href="http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7323.htm">Information Clearing House</a>:</p>
<p>“Question:  The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [From the Shadows], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?</p>
<p>Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.</p>
<p>Question: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?</p>
<p>Brzezinski: It isn&#8217;t quite that. We didn&#8217;t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.”</p>
<p>Fast forward to today, when Vladimir Putin is flexing his muscles in areas of strategic concern to the United States, such as the Middle East. He outflanked Obama on dealing with the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons stockpiles, buying more time for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to remain in power. Putin is also making sure that Assad is armed with sophisticated weapons, prompting Secretary of State John Kerry this week to lamely complain that Russia is “enabling Assad to double down, which is creating an enormous problem.”</p>
<p>Putin is also being courted by Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States, the Palestinians and Iran, who sense the diminishing of U.S. influence in the region and are looking to go with a winner.</p>
<p>A mini Cold War is returning under Obama’s watch as Russian autocrat Putin seeks to widen Russia’s sphere of influence in a bid to return to at least a modest version of the Soviet Union’s glory days.</p>
<p>The one card that the Obama administration may be playing is to dust off a modified version of Brzezinski’s underbelly strategy and put Russia on defense. The purpose would not be to induce a Russian invasion this time, which would unhinge Western Europe and potentially set off other unintended consequences. Rather, the Obama administration may be hoping to divert Putin’s attention away from the Middle East and cause him to redirect money and resources closer to home, in order to prop up Russia’s allies in Ukraine and prevent it from being pried away by the West from Russia’s sphere of influence. Covert support to the protesters may be part of this strategy. So far, however, Putin appears to be winning with little cost and no discernible effect on his involvement in the Middle East or power at home.</p>
<p>The fate of the freedom fighters protesting the Putin-style model of repression in Ukraine remains to be seen.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Why We Must Fight Back</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dr-karen-siegemund/why-we-must-fight-back/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-we-must-fight-back</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 18 Dec 2013 05:20:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dr. Karen Siegemund]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Berlin Wall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Checkpoint Charlie Museum]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213405</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The dire lessons of the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/berlin-brandenburg.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213409" alt="berlin-brandenburg" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/berlin-brandenburg.jpg" width="320" height="207" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://www.rageagainstthemedia.org/">RageAgainstTheMedia.org</a>.</strong></p>
<p>I’m not sure which exhibit it was at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin that brought me up short, but it was during my visit there last November that it dawned on me why I do what I do.  Was it the photo montage of Jutta Gallus, the East German mother who was forcibly separated from her two young daughters for several years and who protested at Checkpoint Charlie every single day during that time, finally being reunited when she won their freedom?   Or maybe it was the exhibit of the two windsurfing boards mounted back to back atop a car in such a way that a person could lie between them invisibly in <a id="FALINK_2_0_1" href="http://www.rageagainstthemedia.org/why-we-fight-com/#">order</a> to escape from East Berlin?  Maybe it was the photos of Peter Fechter, the 18-year-old  man who was shot going over the Wall and died over the next  hour, lying there, screaming for those nearby to help, nobody able to do anything as they, too, would be shot.</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/po.gif"><img class="size-medium wp-image-213412 aligncenter" alt="po" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/po-253x350.gif" width="253" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>Or perhaps it was the exhibit honoring Ronald Reagan, whose steadfast pressure on the East and his “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech did, in fact, help to bring that wall down as well as the Evil Empire itself, that nightmare of an experiment in the ultimate “let’s make it all fair” ideology under which millions upon millions of human beings suffered, and to get away from which inspired those heroic efforts documented in the museum.</p>
<p>Perhaps it was the general sense from walking through the museum – and this was my third time there – and realizing that  these walls, these tyrannical and inhuman constructs happen slowly over time, and can only happen when people do not speak up. (Would they have dared to erect the wall under a Reagan presidency?  I doubt that.)</p>
<p>Whichever exhibit it was, at one point I was thunderstruck.  “This is why I do what I do,”  I thought.  “The way to ensure that tyranny doesn’t take over is by fighting it at every step; we must never stop speaking out, we must never submit, we must do all we can to ensure the liberties that we are guaranteed under the Constitution and not take our freedom for granted.</p>
<p>Of course, Berlin is not only the home of this museum, one of the most <a id="FALINK_1_0_0" href="http://www.rageagainstthemedia.org/why-we-fight-com/#">complete</a> and poignant memorials to the horrors of the Cold War and Communism and to the heroics of those escaping to freedom.  It is, of course, Ground Zero of Hitler’s Nazi regime, a tyranny so horrific that the realities of it are literally impossible to grasp.  But even more than the Cold War and the wall, this incomprehensible totalitarianism did not occur overnight.  Not in the slightest.  Chipping away at freedoms, sometimes with a mallet, sometimes with a pick, can be an all-too-effective way of taming citizens into a regime of fear; in the case of Germany, of course, this applied to all citizens, but infinitely more so in the case of those whom the regime demonized:  The Jews most especially, but others as well, to a much smaller degree.</p>
<p>One of the biggest mallets taken to destroy freedom was the seizure of the press.  This, combined with the really rather genius propagandizing stifled all alternative views and reporting, while advancing a single narrative towards a single agenda:  the Aryanization of as much of the world as possible, the increasing of the power and reach of the Third Reich.</p>
<p>Even before the recent revelations of the mind-bogging overreach of our <a id="FALINK_3_0_2" href="http://www.rageagainstthemedia.org/why-we-fight-com/#">current</a> administration here in the United States, it has been clear that our mainstream media had an equivalent single-mindedness in their “reporting” and that is the furthering of the liberal/progressive agenda.  While indeed, even from the earliest days of our nation various individual news sources have generally had political tendencies towards one side or another, two things were different historically.  First, there were news sources that voiced  both political sides; and perhaps more importantly, that they even had a  bias was understood and a given.</p>
<p>In recent decades, however, and even more so in recent years, there has been a nearly monolithic voice from our dominant media sources.  The “Alphabet Stations:” ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN all provide nearly identical perspectives on all the main topics of the day, all choose to cover essentially the same items while ignoring others, and most importantly, all make every effort to give the impression of impartiality.  Each of these networks considers itself “unbiased,” offering “The News” in such a way as to give the average American the sense – illusory as it is – that he or she now is informed about the world he or she lives in.  It is this illusion of being informed that is, in fact, deeply pernicious.  We don’t even realize we are being lied to; at least in Nazi Germany, that much was clear.</p>
<p>And in a way, what we have here with our own press, which operates under the First Amendment guaranteed right to its independence – the First Amendment, the very first one – is a voluntary ceding of this very right, this very independence, in favor of a unanimous advocacy of an agenda.  That it is voluntary, in this, the Land of Liberty, is difficult to fathom.</p>
<p>So what do we have?  A “free” press that opts, day after day, story after story, to not exercise that freedom and would rather be the mouthpiece of one political agenda, even under the guise of impartiality.  A press in the form of all the main media sites – with  the single exception of Fox –  with their attendant TV stations, websites, Facebook pages, phone apps and so on, creates a sense of the world that is inaccurate, and as we are now learning, dangerously so.</p>
<p>When there is only one exception to this unanimity, and this exception is deliberately, constantly, consistently vilified by the party in power as well as the monolith itself, what we are forced to admit is that our press cannot tolerate diversity of opinion to the exact extent that the party it protects also cannot.  The lock-step alignment both in narrative and focus on silencing alternative views is chilling and dangerous. That it is a voluntary alignment is even more so.  Journalists who, in the past, saw their charter as informing the public to empower us now seem to have as their primary responsibility the assisting of this president in his too-successful efforts to “transform this nation” and who have learned since grade school that the important thing is to “change the world” regardless of what that change might be.  Their lack of knowledge about the past and America’s uniquely beneficial role globally –in fact, their ingrained conviction that America has been a force for evil rather than good, and that we as a nation have more to apologize for than to be proud of – clearly taints their judgment regarding their politics and their role as journalists, and between them and those (equally ignorant) who run our schools, we have a near-perfect feedback-loop of anti-American misinformation and personal missions by young, energetic starry-eyed ignorami to change the world by hand-picking the narrative and denying the validity of any other point of view.  That it is those who crow loudest about diversity who are the quickest to shut down other opinions is ironic, yes, but it is also inevitable.  Only by silencing dissent can the voices of liberal policies ever win over those who espouse freedom.</p>
<p>In fact, what we have is a press that pretends to support the underdog, yet silences it; that pretends to empower the people, yet only advocates for and protects those in power; that pretends to tell the truth, yet lies, obfuscates, omits and distorts in order to advance a single agenda that has nothing to do with the truth but everything to do with their own personal view of the world.  In addition, our news media’s liberal mindset is also evident in how their confidence that they ought to be the arbiters of what we should know rather than assuming that we the people have a right to decide for ourselves.  The disdain that liberals have for the individual, for the individuals’ right to choose, is reflected in their policies as well as the press.</p>
<p>Ironically, while the Nazi press (and Pravda, and the press of other totalitarian regimes) worked in concert with the government’s agenda of enhancing the power of the nation and increasing its stance globally, the American press, also in concert with our government’s agenda, is working to diminish our stature globally and to cast, wherever possible, a negative light on America, American achievement, American traditional values and mores.  How ironic that one way in which our current regime is different from that of Hitler’s (fully acknowledging the unspeakable horrors of his regime) is that Hitler saw his country as great and in some twisted way wanted to strengthen his country, whereas our president sees nothing about our country as great, and believes that a weaker America is better for us and the world at large.    It is astonishing that a Head of State could even consider as a good thing the diminishing the power of the very nation he was elected to lead.  It is beyond comprehension that our Commander in Chief actually believes that a weak America is a good thing globally.  For a totalitarian leader to consolidate power in order to emasculate the nation he leads defies comprehension.  And our press, our popular culture and our schools all have made this possible, and continue to advance this “We are the Evil Empire” anti-patriotic worldview.</p>
<p>So why do I do what I do?  Because a press that supports the agenda that aims to weaken the very nation which gives it its lifeblood is a press that must be fought against.  A self-governing nation can’t survive without a press that informs the people of the truth, and we are seeing, every day, examples of how we are less and less a self-governing nation.  For our constitutionally-protected Fourth Estate to be voluntary propagandists for policies that are suicidal is something that must be fought at every turn.</p>
<p>So why do I do what I do?  Why do I spend my days either directly fighting against the lies and false narratives of our dominant media or else devising new ways of engaging in the battle?  Why do I do what I can to build an effective “army of citizen activists” to evangelize with the truth against the dishonest, depraved, destructive efforts of the media whose goal is to advance the cause of totalitarianism?  Because as long as they are allowed to propagate these lies unchecked, they will win.  As long as their monopoly in information is unchallenged, they learn the lesson that they have <em>carte blanche</em> to lie to us as they wish.  And until the American people have objective information about the world they live in, tyranny has a foothold that becomes increasingly difficult to cast off.</p>
<p>The lessons from the Checkpoint Charlie Museum and from Berlin generally are these:  totalitarianism starts with baby steps, and with a monopoly of the message.  We think we are immune; so did they.  Only by fighting back will the next steps be prevented.  The media should be the inoculant against totalitarianism, not its delivery system.</p>
<p>This is why I do what I do, why so many of us do what we do.</p>
<p>”Not to act is to act,” said Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a resident of Berlin and victim of totalitarianism.  Let no one accuse us of not acting.</p>
<p><em>Dr. Siegemund is the founder and president of “Rage Against the Media,”  an activist organization committed to fighting against the corruption  of America’s dominant  media.  She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Applied Mathematics, a Master’s Degree in International Relations, and a PhD in Education and American Culture.   </em></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Egypt &amp; Russia: Cold War Alliances Revived</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ryan-mauro/egypt-russia-cold-war-alliances-revived/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=egypt-russia-cold-war-alliances-revived</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Dec 2013 05:56:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ryan Mauro]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A fitting arms deal for Obama's post-American world. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/636122-01-08.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213355" alt="636122-01-08" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/636122-01-08-414x350.jpg" width="290" height="245" /></a>U.S. support for the Muslim Brotherhood and the nuclear deal with Iran is propelling the Arab world into the arms of Russia. The Egyptian government, formerly a U.S. ally, will <a href="http://freebeacon.com/russia-egypt-ink-2-billion-weapons-deal/">buy $2 billion in arms</a> from Russia, signaling a strategic realignment in the Middle East that leaves Putin in control.</p>
<p>Egypt’s open embrace of Russia started immediately after the Obama Administration suspended some military aid to the Egyptian government in response to the overthrow of President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. While American aid continued unabated after the Islamists took over, it was cut after they were overthrown.</p>
<p>Support for America and President Obama in particular <a href="http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/anti-brotherhood-wave-weeping-middle-east">collapsed</a> in Egypt in response. Only a single percent of Egyptians have confidence in the U.S. and three percent have confidence in Obama. The U.S. support for the Brotherhood has made it a casualty of the <a href="http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/anti-brotherhood-wave-weeping-middle-east">regional backlash</a> against the Muslim Brotherhood.</p>
<p>Saudi Arabia is embarking on a similar course. Saudi officials now openly talk to reporters about how their country will be more independent in reaction to U.S. policy. Reports about the acquisition of Pakistani nuclear weapons are met with non-denials. The Saudis <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/10266957/Saudis-offer-Russia-secret-oil-deal-if-it-drops-Syria.html">offered</a> Russia a strategic alliance and major oil partnership if Putin abandons the Assad regime.</p>
<p>“We’ve seen several red lines put forward by the president [Obama], which went along and became pinkish as time grew, and eventually ended up completely white,” <a href="http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/dec/16/saudi-prince-obama-youve-made-mess-mideast/">said</a> Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former director of Saudi intelligence.</p>
<p>The Royal Family of Bahrain, a foe of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, <a href="http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/bahrain-crown-prince-us-policy-will-lead-arab-russia-alliance">feels the same way</a>. Crown Prince al-Khalifa recently said, “America seems to suffer from schizophrenia when it deals with the Arab world.”</p>
<p>He compared the U.S. unfavorably to Russia; a shocking assessment considering Bahrain’s hostility to Putin.</p>
<p>“The Russians have proved that they are reliable friends,” he explained.</p>
<p>This trend didn’t start after the Arab Spring brought the Muslim Brotherhood to the forefront. It started shortly after President Obama took the oath of office. By June 2010, Egyptian and Jordanian officials were privately fretting about American diplomacy, specifically how the administration was reaching out to Syria.</p>
<p>“Only if you’re tough with America and adopt an anti-U.S. stance will the U.S. have a more flexible attitude and pay you,” an Egyptian official <a href="http://www.wnd.com/2010/06/167741/">anonymously stated.</a></p>
<p>Similarly, a Jordanian official said the U.S. “sold out the Christians and Druze in Lebanon, sold out the Kurds in Iraq and abandoned the Hariri probe,” referring to the investigation into the assassination of Lebanon’s former Prime Minister. Syria, Iran and Hezbollah are widely thought to be the perpetrators.</p>
<p>It is mostly forgotten that the Iraqi government was confronting the Syrian regime (and therefore, Iran) <a href="http://pjmedia.com/blog/iraq-confronts-syria-over-terrorism-as-u-s-dithers/">back in 2009.</a> The Iraqis were threatening retaliation for Syrian support of terrorism, releasing incriminating intelligence proving Syria’s complicity and trying to rally international support for a U.N. tribunal to prosecute terrorism-supporting Syrian officials.</p>
<p>When the Iraqi government asked for U.S. backing, the administration <a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/405893/missing-in-action/john-p-hannah">declared</a> it would not get involved and that Iraq and Syria should solve their differences diplomatically. An Iraqi official <a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/Iraqi_Politicians_Claim_Foreign_Pressure_To_Prevent_Syria_Probe/1841972.html">claimed</a> that the U.S. privately fought Iraq’s plans for a tribunal. Iraq is now in Iran’s orbit and is an ally of Bashar Assad.</p>
<p>This is great news for Vladimir Putin, who <a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1058688.html">said</a> in 2005 that “The collapse of the Soviet Union was the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”</p>
<p>“Today, Russia is returning to a number of regions lost during the 1990s,” Mikhail Margelov, chairman of Russia’s Foreign Affairs Committee, proudly <a href="http://freebeacon.com/russia-egypt-ink-2-billion-weapons-deal/">stated</a> when talking about the arms deal with Egypt.</p>
<p>Similar statements are coming from the Egyptian side.</p>
<p>“We want to give a new impetus to our relations and return them to the same high level that used to exist with the Soviet Union,” Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy <a href="http://rt.com/news/russia-egypt-ties-military-706/">said.</a></p>
<p>The Middle East is now divided into <a href="http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/middle-east-now-has-three-alliances-none-are-us">three alliances.</a></p>
<p>The first alliance is Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Qatar and Tunisia. The Obama Administration is most favorable to this one, going so far as to <a href="http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/us-taxpayers-pay-spread-turkish-qatar-islamism">use taxpayer money</a> to spread Turkish and Qatari Islamism.</p>
<p>The second alliance is Iran, Hezbollah and Iraq. The administration is <a href="http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/irans-game-plan-whats-behind-new-deal">trying to build a better relationship</a> with this bloc.</p>
<p>The third alliance is Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait. The Gulf country of Oman is trying to stay out of the confrontation with Iran. This bloc is the one most favorable to Israel and the one most vocally disappointed with U.S. policy.</p>
<p>The first two alliances are coming together against the third. Turkey and Iran want to achieve a ceasefire in Syria and their senior officials <a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkey-iran-to-become-backbone-of-regional-stability-davutoglu.aspx?pageID=238&amp;nID=58596&amp;NewsCatID=352">say</a> they want to “join hands” to become the “backbone of regional stability.” Earlier this month, Hamas <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/174977">announced</a> it resumed relations with Iran.</p>
<p>Russia is now in an ideal position where its friendship is craved by <i>both</i> sides in the Middle Eastern power struggle. Putin is the one with the options.  He can pick the Iranian/Turkish side, pick the Saudi/Egyptian side, or play them against each other to his benefit.</p>
<p>It’s an embarrassing moment in history when the Middle East would rather bring back the Soviet Union than rely on today’s United States.</p>
<p><em>The <a href="http://www.theird.org/">Institute on Religion and Democracy</a> contributed to this article.</em></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>U.S. Foreign Policy in &#8216;Whirlfall&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jerome-vitenberg/u-s-foreign-policy-in-whirlfall/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=u-s-foreign-policy-in-whirlfall</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 21 Nov 2013 04:19:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jerome Vitenberg]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Obama's unparalleled ability to bring chaos to the world and blessings to our enemies. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/2012-12-21T191518Z_01_WAS209_RTRMDNP_3_USA-OBAMA-STATE.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-211243" alt="2012-12-21T191518Z_01_WAS209_RTRMDNP_3_USA-OBAMA-STATE" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/2012-12-21T191518Z_01_WAS209_RTRMDNP_3_USA-OBAMA-STATE.jpg" width="274" height="226" /></a>A quarter of a century has elapsed since the Iron Curtain fell, heralding the collapse of the Soviet empire that had perverted human rights, trampled economic freedoms and subjugated its citizens utterly.  The implosion of USSR brought an end to the decades-old Cold War that had been the dominant framework of international relations since the end of World War II.</p>
<p>The disintegration of the communist world meant victory for the liberal democracies.  It yielded an &#8220;American Moment,&#8221; the brief window in which the United States was unchallenged in its global hegemony.</p>
<p>But victory also left the West disoriented within a new landscape no longer defined by the bipolar battle between the free world and the Warsaw Pact. Without clearly identifiable villains, the West lost its compass.</p>
<p>Quickly, global militant fundamentalist organizations, fueled by an ideological hatred of the West, attacked it at large and in its heart. America took up arms in response, but the legitimacy of its wars would soon be challenged by the growing number of casualties and concerns over its invasions of foreign territory, while domestic resistance to the spiraling cost of these campaigns, along with tactical and strategic mistakes, stymied their rapid and decisive conclusion.</p>
<p>Appalling flaws in communicating the rationale for and the justice of the Western military enterprises significantly weakened the effectiveness of the operations as a loose coalition of anti-Western forces and opponents to American foreign interventions used every channel at their disposal to delegitimize Washington. The conflicts&#8217; narratives were turned on their head: The theme of “War for Freedom” against aggressive Fundamentalists became the object of ridicule and was eclipsed by images of innocent civilians resisting the oppressive Western armies invading their lands.</p>
<p>Elected on a wave of popular discontent with both the economy and America&#8217;s overseas adventures, President Obama initiated a strategy of reconciliation with the country&#8217;s enemies, focusing on Arab states and the Muslim world. Pledged to reduce the US footprint in foreign conflicts, the President of the United States adopted a policy of appeasement based on the precept that “it is better to be loved than to be feared.”</p>
<p>This policy, which is hastening the voluntary disintegration of the Western sphere of influence, is creating a vacuum into which old and new powers moved with incredible alacrity, led by realpolitik statesmen with scant regard to Western sensibilities, undeterred from using force to attain their goals. In the Middle East, in Africa, and in Asia, state actors such as Russia and China, as well as fundamentalist and terrorist groups such as the Taliban or Al-Shabaab, have moved in. Even in parts of South America – America&#8217;s &#8220;back yard&#8221; – the United States is being left behind.</p>
<p>Yet, as gentle and as troubling as the President&#8217;s approach towards the West&#8217;s adversaries has become, it is increasingly tougher with America&#8217;s allies, striking a blow to their interests. All over the world, dismayed friends of the United States have been required to bow to their opponents and to relinquish national security principles they consider fundamental to their survival. Decreeing that his approach would transform anti-American wolves into lambs, the leader of the free world is treating loyal allies as vassals, not only abandoning them to the maelstrom unleashed by his retreat, but handcuffing them by his policy of appeasement. Kept in containment, they remain as wounded soldiers abandoned on the battlefield.</p>
<p>Current US policy may be summarized by a new term, “Whirlfall” – a kind of &#8220;perfect storm&#8221; formed by the whirlpool generated by the United States&#8217; declining global presence that is reinforced by the windfall that America&#8217;s global rivals are reaping from US-imposed policy restrictions on its allies.</p>
<p>Sooner or later, confrontations will start between those rival new great powers, in their quest for strategic interests and natural resources. Unhampered by scruples, they will be free to wreak war, death and misery in the arenas vacated by America – until, inevitably, they become strong enough and confident enough to raise a frontal challenge to the democratic West itself.</p>
<p>Then, with freedom, liberalism, democracy and its pursuit of happiness under threat, America will have no option but to respond.  It will have to fight to reestablish its security perimeter and reassert its interests – but from a position of self-imposed weakness with its associated additional cost in lives and resources.</p>
<p>But to whom will Washington be able to turn for help? Sucked into the raging whirlpool, America&#8217;s allies will be hamstrung in their attempts to sustain themselves as their rivals nibble at every piece of the cake left to them.  Not only will they have little strength to join in a reassertion of Western interests – they will be wary of placing their trust again in their unreliable former ally.</p>
<p>By the time Washington wakes up, the &#8220;whirlfall&#8221; will be at America&#8217;s door.  But how many of its allies will answer the call when the West needs them most?</p>
<p><em>Jérôme Vitenberg is a political analyst with a special interest in international affairs. He has taught political science and International relations for the London School of Economics through the University of London&#8217;s International Programs at DEI College, Greece.</em></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>William P. Clark, R.I.P.</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/william-p-clark-r-i-p/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=william-p-clark-r-i-p</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 12 Aug 2013 04:30:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[In memory of the American who defeated Soviet Communism.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/William_patrick_clark.png"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-200220" alt="William_patrick_clark" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/William_patrick_clark.png" width="227" height="318" /></a>Frontpage is very saddened to report that William P. Clark, also known as “Bill Clark” or “Judge Clark,” passed away on Saturday, August 10, 2013. He was Ronald Reagan’s closest aide, friend, and most influential adviser, and the central figure in the Reagan administration’s effort to bring down Soviet communism. Born October 23, 1931 in Oxnard, California, he was 81 years old upon his passing. He now joins his beloved wife, Joan.</p>
<p>Frontpage editors felt it appropriate to run the interview below with Paul Kengor, from our Dec. 26, 2007 issue, in memory of Clark:</p>
<p><strong>The American Who Defeated Soviet Communism</strong></p>
<p>Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania, and author of several books, including a number of major works on Ronald Reagan and the Cold War, including <i>The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. </i>His most recent book is the first biography of William P. “Bill” Clark, titled, <i><a title="http://www.amazon.com/Judge-William-Clark-Ronald-Reagans/dp/1586171836/ref=sr_1_1/104-7849943-5431133?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1192458721&amp;sr=1-1" href="http://www.amazon.com/Judge-William-Clark-Ronald-Reagans/dp/1586171836/ref=sr_1_1/104-7849943-5431133?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1192458721&amp;sr=1-1" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"><i>The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan&#8217;s Top Hand</i></a>, </i>which Kengor has co-authored with Patricia Clark Doerner.</p>
<p><b>FP:</b> Paul Kengor, welcome to Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p><b>Kengor:</b> It is always a pleasure to join FrontPage Interview, Jamie.</p>
<p><b>FP: </b>What inspired you to write this book?</p>
<p><b>Kengor:</b> Bill Clark is the untold story of the Reagan years and particularly the Reagan assault on Soviet communism. He is the untold story of the end of the Cold War. I’m fully confident in asserting that next to Ronald Reagan himself, Bill Clark was the most influential American in the defeat of Soviet communism. On top of that, he has a fascinating, moving personal story.</p>
<p>All of that, Jamie, and yet, as Edmund Morris (the official Reagan biographer) noted, Clark is largely unknown, and certainly unheralded, despite being, as Morris himself called him, the “most impressive” member of Reagan’s inner circle. Why is he forgotten? Because unlike most people in Washington and public life, he never promoted himself, never wanted the attention and limelight, and never wanted much beyond his family and his California ranch. He did his service out of a duty to Ronald Reagan, to country, to God, and to history.</p>
<p>After all that, one morning in Washington, DC in the mid-1980s, he quite literally saddled his horse one last time—Clark actually rode his horse around the Mall early mornings near the Capitol, which was quite a sight—and rode off into the sunset and never told his story.</p>
<p>I didn’t need inspired to write this one. The key was to convince Clark to agree to a biography. For decades he was pressured to do so. Everyone who knew anything about the Reagan years, from liberal biographers to top officials, were unanimous in realizing the importance of Clark’s contributions—from Michael Reagan and Cap Weinberger to Lou Cannon and Maureen Dowd. He could have sold his story for big bucks in the 1980s, but he refused. As <i>National Review</i> noted in an article profiling him as one the leading “unsung conservatives,” Clark was the only major Reagan figure—and far and away the most significant—to not write memoirs.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/clark.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-200219 aligncenter" alt="clark" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/clark-450x337.jpg" width="450" height="337" /></a></p>
<p><b>FP:</b> How powerful was Clark? How about in comparison to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski?</p>
<p><b>Kengor:</b> He was a remarkably powerful national security adviser, which is especially remarkable given that he didn’t desire power. He had no ego whatsoever.</p>
<p>I was taught that Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski were the most powerful national security advisers. A professor of mine at grad school who wrote books on the National Security Council, and these guys who ran it, thought Reagan was a moron, and I can’t recall him saying anything about Clark. In my research on Reagan, particularly at the Reagan Library and through the reading of newly declassified documents, it became immediately clear from the primary-source materials that Clark was extremely influential. I soon realized he was up there with Kissinger and Brzezinski.</p>
<p>Then, one day, I was interviewing Roger Robinson, a very impressive NSC staff member who was Clark’s point man in the economic-warfare campaign against the USSR. Robinson told me that he believed Clark was even more powerful than Kissinger and Brzezinski. This was because of his utterly unique rapport and influence with an extremely powerful president—a president who had an enormous impact on world events. Reagan biographers describe the two as like brothers. Robinson says it was as if they were cut from the same strand of DNA.</p>
<p>Neither Jimmy Carter and Brzezinski, nor Gerald Ford and Kissinger, nor Richard Nixon and Kissinger, had a similar relationship. Ford and Carter were weak presidents. Brzezinski was thwarted and frustrated by Carter’s siding with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. Kissinger was very much treated as Nixon’s subordinate. Robinson states unequivocally: “As a <i>pair</i>, in particular, it’s difficult to equal Ronald Reagan and Bill Clark.” He’s right.</p>
<p>Aside from Robinson’s testimony, every major story on Clark at the time, from the dailies to the weeklies, agreed that next to the president, Clark was the most powerful man in Washington, which, by extension, ranked him among the most powerful men in the world. One of my favorite observations on this came from the cover story on Clark in the <i>New York Times Magazine</i> of August 14, 1983 —the same week he was on the cover of <i>Time</i>—which noted that White House colleagues observed Clark returning from his private meetings with Reagan and “prepared themselves for the important decisions to come.” These two men together hammered out the track for the railroad, with the final destination being the undermining of the Soviet Union .</p>
<p>My conclusion, based on evidence, not on an unwarranted bias to my subject, is that Bill Clark indeed was the most influential national security adviser this country has seen.</p>
<p><b>FP: </b>Why and how did Reagan hire him? Give us the drama in the confirmation hearings.</p>
<p><b>Kengor:</b> Before he took over the NSC in January 1982, Clark was appointed by Reagan as deputy secretary of state, the #2 at State. He had known Clark since the mid-1960s, when Clark had been his loyal and crucial chief of staff when Reagan was governor. Why did Reagan put him at State? As one Republican congressman put it, Reagan needed “an America desk” at State.</p>
<p>Unfortunately for Clark, this meant he had to go through Senate hearings. The Democratic senators pilloried Clark for his lack of foreign-policy experience, largely because he had spent the 1970s as a judge (appointed by Reagan all the way up to the California Supreme Court). The liberal press jumped into the feeding frenzy, reporting inaccurate information about Clark’s academic record.</p>
<p>Most damaging, however, was the work of Senator Joe Biden (D-DE). After telling Clark how much he admired him, he then subjected Clark to an embarrassing pop quiz on foreign leaders, such as “Who is the prime minister of Zimbabwe?” Biden knew Clark wouldn’t know those answers. As this went on and on, he kept apologizing, “Gee, Judge, I hate to do this, I really do. I’m really sorry….” Biden humiliated Clark. The whole world reported on the spectacle, which the <i>Washington Post</i> rightly titled “The Interrogation of Justice Clark.” Foreign papers called him a “nitwit” and the “Don’t Know Man. ”</p>
<p>What the press never saw was what Biden said to Clark after the hearings, and which Clark didn’t share until this book. Biden said: “Hey, Judge, no hard feelings…. And don’t worry: I didn’t know the answers to those questions either.”</p>
<p>The Soviets, by the way, were thrilled with Biden’s work. They were fearful of Clark, knowing he was a hardliner who would allow “Reagan to be Reagan”—Clark’s phrase—and would join Reagan in squeezing them. They knew Clark was not a wishy-washy pragmatist or moderate. TASS, the official Soviet news agency, turned Biden’s performance into a press release, and ran stories in <i>Pravda</i>. The communists would still be crowing about Clark’s alleged incompetence—citing these hearings—when Reagan brought him to the NSC a year later. So, Biden provided an effective tool for Moscow through the duration of Clark’s service to Reagan.</p>
<p>For the record, other Democrats especially hard on Clark were Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Senator John Glenn (D-OH). In the end, Clark received more “no” votes—all from Democrats—than any Reagan appointee. The Soviets were quite pleased with the liberals.</p>
<p>By the way, Michael Moore, continuing a liberal tradition of supplying useful idiots into the post-Cold War period, highlighted Clark and the hearings in his bestselling 2001 book, <i>Stupid White Men</i>.</p>
<p>Think about this, Jamie: With the help of American liberals, the Soviets were able to caricature these two critical men, Bill Clark and Ronald Reagan—the two chief players orchestrating the communist collapse—as incompetent buffoons. It is difficult for us to conceive the degree to which the left, wittingly or unwittingly, aided and abetted the communist cause.</p>
<p><b>FP: </b>What was Clark’s contribution to the end of the Cold War? How exactly did he serve Reagan?</p>
<p><b>Kengor: </b>That’s covered over about 250 pages in the book, and too much to recount here. In short, he laid the foundation to undermine the Soviet empire through a bunch of NSDDs—National Security Decision Directives—that involved efforts from building up the military through a policy of “peace through strength,” to a concerted plan of economic warfare. On the latter, Clark told me about a priceless moment in 1982 when Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin whispered to Clark: “You have declared war on us, economic war.” Clark told me what he couldn’t tell Dobrynin back then, “Yes, we had.” The left might have underestimated Reagan and Clark, but the Soviets did not.</p>
<p>Clark also ensured that SDI was shepherded through, and not sunk pre-emptively by White House moderates. He saw to it that Reagan’s speeches like the 1982 Westminster Address and 1983 Evil Empire speech were not edited of their essence by White House moderates fearful of offending Moscow. He championed programs like the MX missile. He ran secret missions that until this book have not been revealed—like the very significant classified trip to South America in April 1983, where Clark and a few men kept the little country of Suriname from falling into the Soviet-Cuban camp, which would have been far more damaging than anyone reading this right now realizes. He became the principle liaison between Reagan and Pope John Paul II. That’s a short list.</p>
<p><b>FP: </b>Tell us<b> </b>exactly what Clark and Reagan were planning. Were they planning this in private, just the two of them?</p>
<p><b>Kengor:</b> The “plan” is evident in the now declassified NSDDs. Clark was the man who oversaw the creation of every single one of the historic, bold NSDDs that laid the foundation to undermine the USSR. They were all done in a very brief window while Clark was national security adviser. These include NSDD-32—which was the cornerstone for supporting the Solidarity movement in Poland—NSDD-66, NSDD-75, all the way up to NSDD-120, starting with NSDD-2. I will quote just a couple of them:</p>
<p>NSDD-32 was signed by Reagan on May 20, 1982 . Tom Reed, the excellent NSC aide hired by Clark , called NSDD-32, “The Plan to Prevail.” The language in NSDD-32 speaks for itself, stating this Reagan administration objective: “To contain and reverse the expansion of Soviet control and military presence throughout the world…. [T]o contain and reverse the expansion of Soviet influence worldwide.”</p>
<p>NSDD-75 was signed by Reagan on January 17, 1983 . It committed the administration to two core “ U.S. tasks” vis-à-vis the Soviet Union : First, “To contain and over time reverse Soviet expansionism…. This will remain the primary focus of U.S. policy toward the USSR .” And, secondly, “To promote, within the narrow limits available to us, the process of change in the Soviet Union toward a more pluralistic political and economic system in which the power of the privileged ruling elite is gradually reduced.”</p>
<p>By the way, another hero in this was the NSC’s Eastern Europe expert, Professor Richard Pipes, on leave from Harvard, whose pen was responsible for the aforementioned objective articulated in NSDD-75. Pipes told me about how George Shultz’s State Department actually fought to remove that language—i.e., the words that set forth the goal of winning the Cold War and changing the course of human history. The Soviets saw it that way as well, stating in an analysis in a Russian newspaper: “Directive 75 speaks of changing the Soviet Union ’s domestic policy. In other words, the powers that be in Washington are threatening the course of world history, neither more nor less.”</p>
<p>Clark was chief among those “powers that be.” It was due to Reagan’s and Clark’s insistence that Pipes’ extraordinary, prophetic language remained in the text.</p>
<p><b>FP: </b>Did they meet any resistance inside the White House? By whom?</p>
<p><b>Kengor:</b> Oh, yes. The moderates—also known as the pragmatists. There were a bunch of moderates in the White House who did not like Clark, or who at the least were strongly opposed to him ideologically. Jim Baker, Mike Deaver, David Gergen, Dick Darman, and even Nancy Reagan, to name a few. Nancy Reagan and Mike Deaver and Jim Baker in particular concluded that Clark was too hard-line and had to go. They did not like the anti-Soviet direction where he was leading Ronald Reagan. In fact, Clark insisted that he was merely reinforcing where Reagan wanted to go, and ensuring that Reagan’s desires were met. Clark did not see Reagan as a bumbling old man there to be controlled by those who believed they were smarter than Reagan.</p>
<p>Richard Pipes, for instance, was startled by the behavior of Baker and Deaver toward the president. Pipes said of the pair: “they seemed to treat him rather like a grandfather whom one humors but does not take very seriously.” Pipes observed that this was not the case with Clark, nor Ed Meese for that matter.</p>
<p>In the end, these individuals wanted Clark fired. Nancy pushed for him to be fired. Nancy and Deaver felt that one day the Nobel Committee would show up with a Peace Prize for Reagan, if only that Neanderthal Bill Clark would quit dragging his knuckles and get out of the way.</p>
<p>By the way, four years later, Nancy also wanted all the Iran-Contra figures to be tossed overboard. It was Clark , then no longer in the Reagan administration, who urged their pardons and even wrote a draft pardon statement for the president. That statement and those letters are published for the first time in this book. Clark believes that Reagan favored issuing pardons. Apparently, Nancy nuked the thing.</p>
<p><b>FP: </b>What resistance did they meet outside the White House? Who were the dupes that helped the Soviet position and hurt the Reagan-Clark objective?</p>
<p><b>Kengor:</b> There were lots of dupes, especially among the nuclear freezers, which included a bunch of liberal Catholic bishops who didn’t understand the Reagan policy of peace through strength. They didn’t realize that Reagan and Clark were looking to build up in order to build down. Clark, a devout Catholic who as a young man attended seminary and considered the priesthood, was the point man in dealing with the bishops, and handled them extremely effectively, as the <i>New York Times</i> documented.</p>
<p>The Reagan administration was engaged in what Clark rightly called a “dog fight” to get the MX Missile program funded. The left misrepresented the program and its intentions. One example we share in the book are the shameless packages of letters sent to Reagan by leftist elementary-school teachers who organized their students into writing the president telling him that he was a “bad boy” for “favoring” nuclear war. We quote letters forwarded to the president by Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) from sixth-graders at Wellesley Middle School in Wellesley , Massachusetts . “Are you trying to ruin the world by bombs?” wrote one brainwashed little girl. “Who cares if Russia keeps making bombs, they’ll stop if we make the first move.”</p>
<p><b>FP: </b>What about the leaks? Who were the leakers?</p>
<p><b>Kengor:</b> The Reagan administration was besieged by the unauthorized release of information to the press by anonymous sources inside the White House—i.e., by leaks. We today have no appreciation of the enormity of this problem, which Reagan himself called a “virtual hemorrhage of leaks in the national security area,” that had “hampered formulation of foreign and defense policy.” Clark, Reagan, and others found that this was not only, in their minds, undermining administration policy, but had even jeopardized the safety of certain officials traveling abroad.</p>
<p>After a year of this, Reagan had enough. This is one of the primary reasons he brought Bill Clark to the NSC at the start of 1982—to bring in his trouble-shooter to try to get a handle on this problem. Reagan and Clark publicly stated that “all legal methods” would be used to investigate suspected leakers.</p>
<p>It is no secret, and was widely reported, that Jim Baker and David Gergen were believed to be the biggest leakers in Washington. Naturally, given Clark’s mandate to stop the problem, he became their opponent. The leakers flipped their lids when it was reported that Clark and Reagan were considering the use of lie detectors.</p>
<p>The press, naturally, became obsessed with the issue. One of my favorite newspaper articles from this episode was a November 24, 1983 <i>New York Times</i> story on the investigation, which itself was the product of leakers. You could tell from the story that the leakers seemed to be leaking information on the investigation of leaking information. It was absurd.</p>
<p>Clark detested the practice of leaking, which he viewed as a sign of poor character and judgment. He believed that men of integrity should be able to disagree openly and then shake hands and move on.</p>
<p><b>FP: </b>How did Clark ensure that SDI was not stopped by White House moderates?</p>
<p><b>Kengor:</b> Leaking was a central concern in planning the announcement of SDI, which Reagan announced on national television on March 23, 1983. Clark ensured that only those who really needed to know about SDI knew ahead of time. If Clark hadn’t restricted the circle, he feared one of the pragmatists might have tried to torpedo the idea by leaking it to the <i>Washington Post</i> beforehand—“Hey, listen to this hair-brained idea about to be announced by the crazy old fool!”</p>
<p>Of course, once the announcement was out, one of the leakers leaked to the <i>New York Times</i> that Clark was concealing information on SDI, including from Congress. This leaked story ran in the March 31, 1983 edition.</p>
<p>Bill Clark ensured that SDI got out of the gate, circumventing the leakers. Good thing—as Genrikh Trofimenko, the director of the Institute for U.S.A. and Canada Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, put it: “ninety-nine percent of all Russians believe that Reagan won the Cold War because of [his] insistence on SDI.” If not for Bill Clark, Ronald Reagan might not have been able to lift his SDI vision off the ground, certainly not as smoothly.</p>
<p><b>FP: </b>So what are the major revelations or new information in the book?</p>
<p><b>Kengor:</b> Really, basically the entire book is new. It is worth your time for the chapter on Suriname alone (chapter 10). Also worth the pricetag is the 1982 case of Reagan threatening to shoot down Soviet MiGs in Nicaragua, which was communicated to the Soviets, and the heretofore unreported French offer in 1981 to assassinate Moammar Kaddafi.</p>
<p>Another unrecorded account is how Reagan asked Clark to go to China to advise on whether the United States should get involved in a civil engineering project known as Three Gorges Dam. Clark did so, and reported that we should stay out of it. As usual, Reagan took Clark’s advice. Good move!</p>
<p>Finally, we report brand new information on Clark’s secret meeting with Saddam Hussein in January 1986. Clark confirmed in this book that we did not arm Saddam Hussein, especially with WMDs or WMD technology, despite what the moonbat left has recklessly alleged.</p>
<p><b>FP: </b>Why did Clark never write memoirs? Why did this book take so long to happen?</p>
<p><b>Kengor:</b> His humility. He didn’t want to talk about himself. He is a private man. Lou Cannon said of Clark : “He did more for Reagan and the conservative cause while calling less attention to himself than anyone else I know.”</p>
<p>Moreover, he couldn’t fathom that outside of the Reagan component, no one would be interested in his personal story, especially the spiritual aspect. How wrong he was: This was a young man in California, born to a family of sheriffs and lawmen who settled the West, who worked the ranches and vistas of California as a boy, who connected to God through animals and nature, like Saint Francis, his favorite saint. After reading the likes of Bishop Fulton Sheen and all those 1930s Catholic encyclicals that excoriated atheistic communism, Clark attended seminary briefly in 1950. He left for a number of reasons, including his conviction he could better fight communism outside the seminary. A rendezvous with Ronald Reagan awaited, and the rest is history.</p>
<p>Everyone pushed Clark to write memoirs. I managed to earn his trust through my books on Reagan. Once others realized I had his trust, they pushed me to push him to agree to let me write his biography. The only way I ultimately prevailed was by appealing to his sense of duty to Ronald Reagan and history. He knew things no one else knew. He knew it was crucial to get these things on the record, and with accuracy. Even then, I can’t say I ever convinced him. He doesn’t like the attention.</p>
<p><b>FP: </b>Where is Clark today?</p>
<p><b>Kengor:</b> He is 76 years old, and lives out his final days on his ranch in Paso Robles, California, near the gorgeous chapel he built on his property. He struggles with Parkinson’s disease.</p>
<p><b>FP: </b>How do you think Reagan and Clark would deal with the Islamist threat today if they were in the White House?</p>
<p><b>Kengor: </b>Clark is adamant about staying away from drawing parallels there. He says that he and Reagan were focused on defeating the last great “ism”—atheistic Soviet communism. This enemy is much different, even if alike in certain respects.</p>
<p>That said, he would note that one of the chief reasons why Ronald Reagan wanted a missile-defense system was his fear of a nuclear missile launched by what Reagan called a “Middle East madman.” Remember that one of the primary reasons why Reagan refused to drop SDI, even after Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik offered to scrap the entire Soviet missile arsenal, is because Reagan knew that there would never be a world without nuclear weapons or a nuclear threat. There was also the frightening specter of nuclear-armed Islamist lunatics in the Middle East.</p>
<p><b>FP: </b>Overall what was Clark ’s greatest achievement? And what was his strongest asset in terms of his character?</p>
<p><b>Kengor:</b> Winning the Cold War was his greatest achievement. No question. His strongest asset was his character. Jean Kirkpatrick, who was not one for effusive, unnecessary praise, said in 1983 that Clark “fulfills the stereotype of the strong, silent type. He’s decent, upright, honest, forthright and serious.” Edmund Morris says the same thing. Those are two very cynical sources, not easy to impress.</p>
<p>It’s quite a challenge for a biographer to write about someone who everyone liked as a person, and who everyone agrees was extremely influential, impressive, but unheralded. As a biographer, it is heard to avoid hagiography. Clark , however, was all of those things—but certainly no saint, as he is quick to note.</p>
<p>He really does have the persona of the Hollywood cowboys of the Old West—right out of the movies. Not to be melodramatic, but he is that guy in the white hat who at the end of the film, after taking out the bad guys and saying goodbye to the pretty girl, gets on his horse, turns his back to the camera, and slowly and silently rides off into the sunset, where he is never heard from again.</p>
<p><b>FP:</b> Paul Kengor, thank you for joining us.</p>
<p><b>Kengor:</b> It is my pleasure, Jamie. Keep up the great work.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Putin and the Shadow of the KGB &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Apr 2013 04:35:56 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[Where were the Nuremberg-style trials for communist mass murderers?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/putin-and-the-shadow-of-the-kgb-on-the-glazov-gang/putinimage12/" rel="attachment wp-att-184552"><img class=" wp-image-184552 alignleft" title="PutinImage12" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/PutinImage12.jpg" alt="" width="280" height="210" /></a>This week’s <em>Glazov Gang</em> had the honor of being joined by <strong>Borek Volarik</strong>, a Czech Defector, <strong>Kevin Gonzales</strong>, the producer of the upcoming documentary: “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/martyred-in-the-ussr-militant-atheism-in-the-former-soviet-union/">Martyred in the USSR</a>,” and <strong>Leon Weinstein, </strong>a Soviet emigré and author of “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-101-Leon-Weinstein/dp/1937387615">Capitalism 101</a>.”</p>
<p>The Gang members gathered to discuss:<em> Putin and the Shadow of the KGB. </em>The dialogue occurred in <strong>Part II</strong> and dealt with why exactly there were never any Nuremberg-style trials for communist mass murderers. The segment focused on why the KGB still retains power in Russia, the impotence of the West in confronting Putin, and why people should read &#8220;Mein Kampf&#8221; to gain insight not only into Putin&#8217;s propaganda, but also Obama&#8217;s.</p>
<p><strong>Part I</strong> featured Kevin Gonzales&#8217; upcoming documentary: “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/martyred-in-the-ussr-militant-atheism-in-the-former-soviet-union/">Martyred in the USSR</a>,” which focuses on the persecution of Christians, as well as of all religions, under the former Soviet regime. The segment also shed light on why and how the Left has forced this socialist mass crime into historical invisibility.</p>
<p>To watch both parts of the two-part series, see below:</p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wNqSFjUpUp8" frameborder="0" width="450" height="315"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/XsusDfAXVbU" frameborder="0" width="450" height="315"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>You can make sure that </strong><a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/donate.html?key=ASY2NUM6OSJ9" target="_blank"><strong><em>Jamie Glazov Productions</em></strong></a><strong> continues to take you where no other media programs dare to go. Help us by </strong><a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/donate.html?key=ASY2NUM6OSJ9" target="_blank"><strong>clicking here</strong></a><strong> and making a tax deductible contribution today. To see the archives of <em>The Glazov Gang</em>, </strong><a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UUqCK5RFjwgmx2z4sOjqd-kQ&amp;feature=plcp"><strong>click here.</strong></a><strong></strong></p>
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		<title>“The Americans” – Rooting for the KGB?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/the-americans-rooting-for-the-kgb/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-americans-rooting-for-the-kgb</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 04 Feb 2013 04:40:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FX television network.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the americans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tv drama]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=176104</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new TV drama is surprisingly pro-American.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/the-americans-rooting-for-the-kgb/fx_americans/" rel="attachment wp-att-176165"><img class="size-full wp-image-176165 alignleft" title="FX_Americans" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/FX_Americans.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="282" /></a>Last week a Cold War spy thriller with a twist debuted on the FX television network. The twist is that the <em>bad guys</em> – the Soviets – are the stars, and that the show’s producers are hoping to get American audiences to root for the KGB. But if that’s their aim, they failed miserably in the season premiere; the real twist is that <em>The Americans</em> turns out to be refreshingly pro-American entertainment.</p>
<p><em>The Americans</em> is a gripping, action-filled drama about two Soviet spies living undercover as a normal American couple in 1981 Washington, D.C. Their two children, oblivious to their parents’ true identities, are being raised as typical American kids. In between getting the kids off to school and taking them out for ice cream, the husband and wife discuss things like when to kill the defector bound and gagged in their garage, or whether the FBI agent who just moved in across the street is on to them.</p>
<p>According to an <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/americans-fx-asks-viewers-root-410370">article</a> in the entertainment trade magazine <em>The Hollywood Reporter</em> (<em>THR</em>), executive producer Joel Fields expressed his hope for the show’s impact: “It might be a little different to believe and get used to, but we want you to root for the KGB. They&#8217;re going to try to get the Soviets to win the Cold War.”</p>
<p>Actually, it’s no surprise at all that progressive Hollywood would want you to root for the enemy, particularly Communists. What is rather stunning is the openness with which the show’s creators express that desire. The <em>THR</em> article stated that “the creative team behind the high-profile launch expressed a confidence that more than enough time has passed for American audiences to not hold a grudge.”</p>
<p>It’s unclear whether the phrase “hold a grudge” is <em>THR</em>’s or originated with the producers, but it is a phenomenally poor choice of words. “Hold a grudge” about the Cold War? We’re talking about our epic conflict with a totalitarian world view that resulted in the deaths of countless millions and which took us to the brink of nuclear war. As FrontPage’s own Daniel Greenfield <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/new-cable-series-wants-to-make-audiences-cheer-for-the-kgb/">wrote</a>, “This isn’t like the Yankees and the Red Sox.” Nonetheless, the producers think we’ve had time to “get over it.”</p>
<p>“If you tried to tell a story like this about al-Qaeda now,” Fields continued, “it would be impossible; no one would want to hear it. I feel even the same could have been said up to 10 years after the cold war ended.” The stunning implication here is that, given a few more years, American viewers will come around and embrace a show in which they are expected to “root for” al Qaeda protagonists. Similarly, the producers think we’re all emotionally healed enough now to put the Cold War behind us: “This is a show where the enemies are the heroes, with all the questions that come with that,” <a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-the-americans-fx-keri-russell-matthew-rhys-20130127,0,1512940.story">said</a> creator Joe Weisberg, a former CIA agent. “You couldn&#8217;t do that right after the Cold War. But you can do it 30 years later.”</p>
<p>To compel viewers to root for the enemy, Weisberg says he wants viewers to “take a hard look at both sides of the Cold War,” as <em>THR</em> phrased it. I don’t know what his politics are, but it’s typical of progressives to want to recast America as the bad guy in any given conflict. He calls the opposing sides in that war “really competing value systems,” which is putting it mildly, and suggests that capitalism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be: “There’s no question that repressive socialism failed, but unbridled consumption hasn’t exactly led to great satisfaction – and one problem is how do we express that dramatically.”</p>
<p>Note how he said “repressive” socialism failed, which could be interpreted to mean that a <em>non</em>-repressive socialism – as if there were such a thing – would work. This is characteristic of the progressive mindset: forever unwilling to admit that Communism is inherently disastrous, and forever determined to get it right <em>this time</em>. As for “unbridled consumption,” no one claims that consumption alone equals happiness  &#8211; but standing in line to buy a big-screen TV in a capitalist society is much more satisfying than standing in line to buy bread in a socialist society.</p>
<p>These comments led me to believe that the show would be blatantly anti-American. That impression was <em>completely</em> off-base. In its first episode, <em>The Americans</em> describes Reagan’s America as “strong and capable.” Patriotic citizens are shown singing our national anthem and waving flags, without the slightest tinge of ridicule from the filmmakers. FBI agents are shown as decent men dedicated to national security, rather than corrupt and thuggish. A government official declares, “We have truth and justice on our side, and we will prevail” – without a hint of irony or sarcasm.</p>
<p>Contrast that with the movie <em>Superman Returns</em> from several years ago, in which the filmmakers altered Superman’s famous tagline from “Truth, justice and the American way” to the flippant, cynical “Truth, justice <em>and all that stuff</em>.”</p>
<p>After many years undercover, “the American way” is starting to seduce the show’s husband. In one riveting confrontation, his wife, an ice-hearted true believer, is aghast when he suggests that they betray the motherland, take the money the American government is offering defectors, and embrace the good life. “America’s not so bad,” he argues. “What’s so bad about it? The electricity works all the time, food’s pretty great… We would have a great life because we would have money.” He accuses her of resenting the Americanization of their children. “<em>I’m not finished with them yet</em>,” she replies, revealing the totalitarianism at the heart of her ideology. “They don’t have to be regular Americans. They could be socialists -”</p>
<p>“They’re not gonna be socialists,” he shoots back. “This place doesn’t turn out socialists.” Sadly, in 2013 it does; we have even installed one in the Oval Office itself. Maybe we didn’t win the Cold War in the long run after all.</p>
<p>The show’s Soviet spies may be compelling protagonists, but they are not portrayed as “the heroes,” despite the creator’s claim, and America’s role in the Cold War is not called into question. Not yet, anyway; anything could happen in the remainder of the series, of course, including Hollywood’s predictable anti-American sucker punches. But based solely on this first episode, I can’t recommend <em>The Americans</em> highly enough to viewers who want to root for the <em>real</em> good guys.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>The Death of Oliver Stone’s Good Soviet Union</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-death-of-oliver-stones-good-soviet-union/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-death-of-oliver-stones-good-soviet-union</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 29 Jan 2013 04:50:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gorbachev]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Reagan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Showtime]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[untold history]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=174580</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How a neo-Communist filmmaker learned to stop worrying and hate history.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-death-of-oliver-stones-good-soviet-union/ronald-reagan-gorbachev/" rel="attachment wp-att-175323"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-175323" title="ronald-reagan-gorbachev" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/ronald-reagan-gorbachev.jpg" alt="" width="290" height="198" /></a><em>Editor’s note: The following is the eighth installment of a series of articles Frontpage is running in response to Oliver Stone’s neo-Communist documentary series, “The Untold History of the United States.” Frontpage will be reviewing each episode of the Stone series, exposing the leftist hateful lies about America and setting the record straight. Below is a review of Part 8 of the series.</em></p>
<p>In episode 8 of Oliver Stone&#8217;s Untold History of the United State, Stone says:</p>
<p>&#8220;Right wing forces have always operated freely and openly in the dark chasms of American life where racism, militarism, imperialism and blind devotion to private enterprise festered.&#8221;</p>
<p>Accompanying this is footage from Birth of a Nation. A film that Thomas Dixon Jr., author of “The Clansman”, the book that it was based on, screened for President Woodrow Wilson with the intention that it &#8220;would transform every man in the audience into a good Democrat!&#8221; Following that is footage of American soldiers marching off to WWI under a Democratic president. The choice of footage once again reminds us that Oliver Stone&#8217;s knowledge of history is as scrambled as his brain.</p>
<p>Over this confused juxtaposition of history, the narration goes on to inform us that the same forces that spawned the Nazi Party and the McCarthyites, a group that included Robert F. Kennedy, also created the Tea Party. It&#8217;s a reminder that the difference between Oliver Stone&#8217;s &#8220;Untold History of the United States&#8221; and a YouTube conspiracy video about the Freemasons is that the latter doesn&#8217;t have a slot on Showtime. Yet.</p>
<p>Topping all that, the soporific narration, borrowed from a PBS special, which just classed together Adolf Hitler, RFK, Woodrow Wilson and Michele Bachmann, goes on to accuse these &#8220;dark forces&#8221; of being ignorant of history. And we&#8217;re less than 3 minutes into the madness that is Episode 8 of the worst thing that Showtime has ever aired. And that includes Piranha and Scream 4.</p>
<p>Episode 8, &#8220;Reagan, Gorbachev &amp; the Third World: Revival of Fortune,&#8221; begins by reimagining Nixon as a progressive who established the EPA, supported the ERA and strengthened the Voting Rights Act. The logic of this might make more sense if the Nixon Administration hadn&#8217;t just been described as being on a mission to move America far to the right.</p>
<p>But consistency doesn&#8217;t matter to Oliver Stone. Within 40 seconds, Nixon goes from an ally of the KKK to a civil rights leader, just to set up the omnipresent claim that the next Republican president was the one to really move the Republican Party to the right. This is the reality-free narrative that the left constantly embraces, but it has never been quite as reality-free as it is in the hands of America&#8217;s leading reality-free filmmaker.</p>
<p>6 minutes in and the vast right-wing conspiracy is on the table. &#8220;Nixon&#8217;s rage had become their own,&#8221; the narrator whispers. This rage was apparently expressed by creating think-tanks like Heritage and AEI promoting deregulation and privatization; probably the least angry example of rage in the entire history of anger.</p>
<p>&#8220;The moneyed class,&#8221; the narrator hisses, like a low-rent Marxist, &#8220;were back.&#8221; They had apparently gone off to vacation on Martha&#8217;s Vineyard and hobnob with the Kennedys, but now they were back and angrily creating think-tanks.</p>
<p>Carter ushers in a brief period of idealistic utopia, complete with appeasement of the USSR, but then the camera zooms to Zbigniew Brzezinski. Ominous music plays. The Trilateral Commission logo appears on the screen while the narrator informs us about its conspiracies on behalf of the “World Capitalist Order.” And we&#8217;re back in YouTube territory.</p>
<p>Like most conspiracy theorists, Stone is sloppy. He spends a minute on the Trilateral Commission and then pretends that the American Embassy was seized because the Shah had been admitted to the US for medical treatment. It&#8217;s silly, but that&#8217;s what history as a Neo-Communist conspiracy cartoon looks like.</p>
<p>Every Anti-American country and group, whether it&#8217;s the USSR invading Afghanistan or the Iranians taking American hostages, is depicted as careful and forbearing. On the other side of the ocean however, Uncle Sam stomps around in cowboy boots guzzling the blood of the oppressed like cheap whiskey.</p>
<p>The Soviet Union wanted peace and therefore had no choice but to invade Afghanistan. While the United States undermined the Soviet Union and backed Islamic militants, which led, we are told, to September 11.</p>
<p>&#8220;The Untold History of the United States&#8221; is full of such overreaching generalizations, but short on historical detail. No distinction is made between the Arab fighters and the Afghan fighters that the United States was supporting. No mention is made of the fact that the Soviet Union ruthlessly and brutally murdered its own puppet in a senseless assault. Basic pieces of information like that have no place in Oliver Stone&#8217;s expensive Showtime YouTube video.</p>
<p>Episode 8 depicts Reagan as an ignorant buffoon. Carter&#8217;s evil anti-Communist puppet master was Brzezinski. Reagan&#8217;s evil puppet master turns out to be William Casey, a man so awful that the narrator informs us, while serial killer music plays, that he had multiple statues of the Virgin Mary in his Long Island mansion.</p>
<p>Casey believed that the USSR was involved in international terrorism; the narrator however gravely informs us that the Soviets actually disapproved of international terrorism. Such a claim barely had any justification being made in the 80s. After the fall of the USSR, when there are volumes of documents listing the amounts of money and types of training that the KGB provided to terrorist groups, it&#8217;s just a naked lie.</p>
<p>The Sandinistas are heroes and the Contras are villains, along with every leftist gang in Latin America. To prove his point, Stone rolls footage from his own movie, Salvador, as we&#8217;re treated to James Woods emoting in a fictional movie that Stone seems unable to distinguish from the real thing.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s just the beginning of the confusion. Hezbollah bombs the Marine barracks, and with no explanation for why the Marines were in Lebanon, the episode insists that Reagan then dispatched troops to Grenada to restore America&#8217;s wounded pride. That&#8217;s stupid even by leftist standards.</p>
<p>In Grenada, the narration informs us, using footage from Clint Eastwood&#8217;s Heartbreak Ridge, 19 soldiers were killed fighting &#8220;poorly armed Cuban construction workers.&#8221; Elsewhere Reagan oppresses poor air traffic controllers while throwing lavish parties, illustrated by footage from Heaven&#8217;s Gate, a movie about the 1890s. Most YouTube conspiracy videos are more plausible and have better narrative logic.</p>
<p>Still Stone must sooner or later explain the collapse of the Soviet Union. And he does this by painting Mikhail Gorbachev as the true hero, another Henry Wallace, who genuinely wanted peace and disarmament. Missile defense, we are told was a pipe dream, on a television show filmed in the age of Iron Dome. The USSR knew that SDI could never work, we are told, yet for some reason refused to make peace unless Reagan gave it up.</p>
<p>Gorbachev becomes the courageous visionary leader, while Reagan is just another puppet of the imperialistic American empire.</p>
<p>None of this is history. It’s barely even a conspiracy theory. It’s long, yet short on details, broken up into scrambled bits and illustrated with movie scenes to add even more unreality. None of it hangs together. All of it depends on accepting Stone’s premise that America is run by an evil conspiracy, but the rest of the world isn’t. If you accept that, then the story makes sense. If you question it, then it all falls apart.</p>
<p>The Untold History of the United States doesn’t depend on merely assuming moral equivalency between the US and the USSR, but the moral superiority of the USSR. That assumption is never backed up with facts. It’s innate in the story that we are told. It is a bias so baked in that Stone is incapable of recognizing his own logical flaws or the clumsiness of his storytelling. You either agree with him that the USSR was morally superior to the United States. Or you are a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy.</p>
<p><strong>Related articles on Stone’s series:</strong></p>
<p>1. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-left-wing-agitprop/">Bruce Thornton’s introduction</a> to this Frontpage series.</p>
<p>2. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/neo-communism-out-of-the-closet/">David Horowitz’s analysis</a> of the meaning behind the warm reception of Stone’s Kremlin propaganda.</p>
<p>3. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-untrue-history-stalin-the-great-hero-of-wwii/">Matthew Vadum’s review</a> of Stone’s first episode.</p>
<p>4. Daniel Flynn’s review of “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/through-oliver-stones-looking-glass/">Roosevelt, Truman and Wallace</a>,” the second episode.</p>
<p>5. Daniel Greenfield’s <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-atom-bomb-and-the-truth-bomb/">review of “The Bomb,”</a> the third episode.</p>
<p>6. Bruce Thornton’s review of “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-cold-war-melodrama/">The Cold War: 1945-1950</a>,” the 4th episode.</p>
<p>7. Matthew Vadum’s review of “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-distortion-of-the-eisenhower-era/">The 50s: Eisenhower, The Bomb &amp; The Third World</a>,” the 5th episode.</p>
<p>8. Larry Schweikart’s review of “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/the-cuban-missile-crisis-world-saved-by-the-soviets-says-oliver-stone/">The Cuban Missile Crisis,</a>” the 6th episode.</p>
<p>9. Larry Schweikart&#8217;s review of “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/a-history-lesson-for-oliver-stone-on-vietnam/">Johnson, Nixon &amp; Vietnam: Reversal of Fortune</a>,” the 7th episode.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Oliver Stone&#8217;s Distortion of the Eisenhower Era</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-distortion-of-the-eisenhower-era/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oliver-stones-distortion-of-the-eisenhower-era</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 16 Jan 2013 04:34:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Eisenhower]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Showtime]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[untold history]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=173398</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the radical historical revisionist hates Ike.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-distortion-of-the-eisenhower-era/eisenhower-wc/" rel="attachment wp-att-173407"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-173407" title="Eisenhower-WC" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Eisenhower-WC.png" alt="" width="265" height="209" /></a><em>Editor’s note: The following is the fifth installment of a series of articles Frontpage is running in response to Oliver Stone’s neo-Communist documentary series, “The Untold History of the United States.&#8221; Frontpage will be reviewing each episode of the Stone series, exposing the leftist hateful lies about America and setting the record straight. Below is a review of Part 5 of the series.</em></p>
<p>President Dwight D. Eisenhower is responsible for transforming America into the imperialist global bully it supposedly is today, according to radical Hollywood fabulist Oliver Stone.</p>
<p>In the fifth episode of his multi-part revisionist assault on modern American history, <em>Untold History of the United States</em>, Stone argues that Eisenhower was a willing tool of greedy U.S. corporations and a warmonger who refused to make deals with a Soviet Union that was suing for peace.</p>
<p>Stone blames Eisenhower, the popular former five-star general who led the U.S. and its allies to victory in World War Two, for creating &#8220;a permanent war economy.&#8221; Essentially, Ike turned America into a high-tech modern-day Sparta, Stone claims, by permanently ramping up military expenditures. Of course to the extent that Eisenhower promoted high levels of defense spending he was only carrying on the policies of President Franklin Roosevelt. The Communist-loving director, known for palling around with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, could never forgive Eisenhower for deploying nuclear weapons that were aimed at Stone&#8217;s beloved USSR.</p>
<p>&#8220;Nuclear bombs were now the foundation of America&#8217;s empire and provided the new emperor, its president, with a mystical power that required more and more suffocating secrecy even if those powers went far beyond the original limits of executive power defined in the Constitution,&#8221; Stone says.</p>
<p>Of course the United States has never been an empire, but Stone&#8217;s Marxist worldview clouds his perception. Apart perhaps from its pursuit of &#8220;manifest destiny&#8221; and a few military adventures in the 1800s, when the U.S. has projected its power beyond its home territory it has eventually pulled back.</p>
<p>The U.S., unlike so many world powers, does not conquer other countries: it liberates them and then goes home. This has, understandably, given the U.S. a special moral standing in the community of nations and it certainly does not make the American president an emperor.</p>
<p>But Stone&#8217;s unpatriotic rant continues. America&#8217;s nuclear arsenal and the pricey infrastructure supporting it allowed the imperialistic U.S. to dominate the world for decades, he insists. &#8220;And although the bombs themselves were not expensive, the huge infrastructure was, requiring bases in the U.S. and abroad and enormous delivery systems by bomber, missile, aircraft carrier, and submarine.&#8221;</p>
<p>America wasn&#8217;t threatening the free world; it was shielding it with its nuclear umbrella. This is not the behavior of a ruthless conqueror state.</p>
<p>Stone continues attacking Eisenhower, claiming that he planted the seeds for later &#8220;blowback&#8221; against the U.S. by intervening in the affairs of countries such as Iran. The Islamic revolution of 1979 that transformed that country from a U.S. ally to a hostile totalitarian theocracy was a long time coming. The revolution was an explosion of pent-up hostility, a delayed reaction to the U.S.- and U.K.-backed 1953 ouster of Iran&#8217;s socialist prime minister Mohammed Mosaddegh, Stone says. And to make matters worse, it was carried out solely to guarantee Western access to Iran&#8217;s oil, Stone maintains.</p>
<p>In other words, all the troubles between Iran and the United States are the American government&#8217;s fault. The fact that Mosaddegh and his fellow looters stole from U.S. investors by nationalizing the assets of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. (later known as British Petroleum or BP) doesn&#8217;t figure in Stone&#8217;s calculus. He doesn&#8217;t care that the U.S. used its intelligence apparatus to restore property to its rightful owners, a proper function of government.</p>
<p>The Cold War itself, which began even before the dust of the Second World War had settled, was needlessly prolonged by Eisenhower, Stone argues.</p>
<p>Joseph Stalin died a little over a month after Eisenhower became president in January 1953. But according to Stone, Ike was incompetent because he failed to singlehandedly end the Cold War right there and then.</p>
<p>&#8220;Signs emanating from Moscow indicated the Kremlin was ready to change course, but because of ideology, political calculations, the exigencies of a militarized state and a limited imagination, Eisenhower repeatedly failed to seize the opportunities that emerged,&#8221; Stone says.</p>
<p>Stone has engaged in this kind of revisionist fantasy before. He previously attempted to turn President John F. Kennedy into a radical left-wing folk hero by inventing the idea that JFK was a dove who was secretly preparing to de-escalate U.S. hostilities in Vietnam when he was cut down by an assassin.</p>
<p>In any event, it&#8217;s unclear what Soviet smoke signals Stone is referring to and even less clear what Eisenhower could have done during the three years after Stalin&#8217;s death that it took the less bloodthirsty Nikita Khrushchev to consolidate power in the still-totalitarian USSR.</p>
<p>But this kind of bold unprovable assertion, the idea that Ike could have waved a magical wand to end the Cold War the moment Stalin died, is nothing new for Stone. The director pulls supposed facts out of thin air and trumpets them in order to generate publicity for his work.</p>
<p>Stone also takes on the U.S. rationale for fighting the Cold War. Defending America against Communism wasn&#8217;t a matter of national survival; it was strictly a means of fattening corporate coffers.</p>
<p>&#8220;Anticommunism was good for business,&#8221; the 66-year-old Oscar winner and media darling matter-of-factly intones.</p>
<p>Highlighting the same passages used to set the stage in the opening minutes of his paranoid conspiracy-theory film from 1991, <em>JFK</em>, Stone shows archival footage of Eisenhower in black and white, stiffly reading his 1961 farewell address aloud.</p>
<blockquote><p>We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. The total influence &#8212; economic, political, even spiritual &#8212; is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. [...] In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. [...] We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.</p></blockquote>
<p>In Stone&#8217;s view, the address showed that &#8220;Eisenhower seemed to understand the monstrosity he had created and seemed almost to be asking for absolution.&#8221;</p>
<p>But that forgiveness is not forthcoming.</p>
<p>Stone accuses Ike of creating the very same &#8220;military-industrial complex&#8221; that the 34th president denounced in his famous farewell address.</p>
<p>&#8220;The inescapable truth is that the beloved Dwight Eisenhower put the world on a glide path towards annihilation with the most gargantuan expansion of military power in history and left the world a far more dangerous place than when he first took office,&#8221; Stone lectures, without trotting out actual evidence of heightened peril.</p>
<p>The mere fact that Ike led a U.S. military buildup <em>is</em> proof that he was a monster, in Stone&#8217;s eyes. That the Soviet Union was also participating in the arms race seems to have escaped his notice.</p>
<p>Stone is especially incensed at the role Eisenhower played in the so-called Red Scare. The phony threat of Communism, as he sees it, was perpetuated by Eisenhower after first being manufactured by President Truman, Sen. Joe McCarthy, arms makers and others to justify anti-Soviet saber-rattling.</p>
<p>Stone believes that the real tragedy, apart from America&#8217;s pesky insistence on defending itself against Communist aggression, was that left-wing groups intent on subverting America from the inside suffered political setbacks as their treachery was exposed for all to see. In other words, it disturbs the Communist-loving movie director that in the Eisenhower era, supporting Marxism <em>temporarily</em> ceased to be cool in America after decades of being considered avant-garde.</p>
<p>&#8220;The Red Scare eviscerated the U.S. left, the labor unions and political and cultural organizations which had spurred the reforms of the New Deal, 1930s and 1940s,&#8221; Stone says.</p>
<p>&#8220;With the exception of the civil rights and antinuclear movements left-wing dissent and progressive reform throughout the 1950s would remain silent and the labor movement would never recover.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Red Scare hurt America more than it hurt the Soviet Union, Stone editorializes. &#8220;It certainly decimated the legal Communist Party USA whose membership had dropped from 80,000 in &#8217;44 to below 10,000 by the mid &#8217;50s, with probably 1,500 of them paid FBI informants.&#8221;</p>
<p>Stone ignores the fact that after a few years in a holding pattern after World War Two, the Left enjoyed a ferocious resurgence in the 1960s and 1970s. He also doesn&#8217;t mention that the labor movement&#8217;s decades-long slide into oblivion is largely related to its own self-inflicted wounds, overreaches, and insistence on killing the corporate golden goose.</p>
<p>Stone doesn&#8217;t dare point out that the Communist Party USA wasn&#8217;t a bunch of kind-hearted idealists trying to make America a better place. The CPUSA was controlled by the Soviet Union for most of its history. The Moscow-directed party also engaged in espionage, infiltrated labor unions, and used front groups to act as a fifth column within the United States.</p>
<p>It needs to be noted that even the term Stone uses, &#8220;Red Scare,&#8221; is a lie. It is a deceptively misdescriptive name for American culture&#8217;s entirely rational response to the threat posed by world communism, Soviet spies, and domestic subversives in the 1950s.</p>
<p>Stone thinks Ike should have taken on the anticommunists in an era in which &#8220;paranoia was rampant.&#8221;</p>
<p>Because Eisenhower &#8220;never publicly attacked the extremist tactics of the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare,&#8221; it is his fault that throughout &#8220;the 1950s political debate essentially continued to vanish in the United States,&#8221; the director claims.</p>
<p>Stone doesn&#8217;t seem to understand that political debate didn&#8217;t exactly &#8220;vanish&#8221; in the Fifties.</p>
<p>It simply didn&#8217;t favor the Left.</p>
<p>But this is one of the key reasons Stone doesn&#8217;t like Ike.</p>
<p><strong>Related articles on Stone’s series:</strong></p>
<p>1. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-left-wing-agitprop/">Bruce Thornton’s introduction</a> to this Frontpage series.</p>
<p>2. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-untrue-history-stalin-the-great-hero-of-wwii/">Matthew Vadum’s review</a> of Stone’s first episode.</p>
<p>3. Daniel Flynn’s review of “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/through-oliver-stones-looking-glass/">Roosevelt, Truman and Wallace</a>,” the second episode.</p>
<p>4. Daniel Greenfield’s <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-atom-bomb-and-the-truth-bomb/">review of “The Bomb,”</a> the third episode.</p>
<p>5. Bruce Thornton&#8217;s review of &#8220;<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-cold-war-melodrama/">The Cold War: 1945-1950</a>,&#8221; the 4th episode.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Oliver Stone: America Is a &#8216;Fascist Force&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/oliver-stone-america-is-a-fascist-force/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oliver-stone-america-is-a-fascist-force</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 11 Jan 2013 04:46:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kazin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[kuznick]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Michael Kazin's interview with Stone and Kuznick reveals the camp in which the whole Left resides.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/oliver-stone-america-is-a-fascist-force/kaz/" rel="attachment wp-att-173092"><img class=" wp-image-173092 alignleft" title="kaz" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/kaz.png" alt="" width="303" height="209" /></a>The C-SPAN Book TV program <a href="http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/309696-1"><em>After Words</em></a> recently featured a conversation with controversial film director <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=628">Oliver Stone</a> and American University professor Peter Kuznick. The two are co-authors of a massive new book, <em>The Untold History of the United States</em>, which Stone has parlayed into a multi-part Showtime documentary (and which FrontPage Mag has addressed <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-untrue-history-stalin-the-great-hero-of-wwii/">here</a>, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-left-wing-agitprop/">here</a>, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/through-oliver-stones-looking-glass/">here</a>, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-cold-war-melodrama/">here</a> and <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-untold-history-of-the-left/">here</a>). As you might expect, the hour featured Kuznick and Stone denouncing American imperialism and placing the blame for Cold War mistrust on the U.S., while only paying lip service to the notion that some responsibility lay with the Soviets.</p>
<p>The program was hosted by Michael Kazin, professor of history at Georgetown University and the co-editor of <em>Dissent</em>, a quarterly socialist magazine of politics and culture. As a Harvard student, Kazin was a leader in the <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6723">Students for a Democratic Society</a> and briefly a member of the <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6808">Weatherman</a> faction. Although he describes himself in this show as “an anti-Communist leftist, someone who thinks that Stalin was a horrible mass murderer, one of the worst in history,” and although he gently challenges his guests on a couple of occasions, for the most part Kazin is supportive of their Cold War perspective: “I agree with both of you that the United States was hardly blameless, and did a lot to exacerbate that rivalry and hostility.” What a less predictable and more stimulating program it might have been if, say, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/author/ron-radosh/">Ron Radosh</a> or David Horowitz had been tapped to moderate the discussion.</p>
<p>Stone and Kuznick discuss at length the 1948 Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace, the unsung hero of their book. When <em>Time</em> publisher Henry Luce called for the 20<sup>th</sup> century to be “the American century,” Wallace responded by saying, in Kuznick’s words, “it shouldn’t be the American century. It should be the century of the Common Man. So what we need is a worldwide revolution.” Kuznick relates approvingly how Wallace “called for ending colonialism, ending imperialism, ending monopolies and cartels, and the economic exploitation.”</p>
<p>Kuznick goes on to lament how badly Americans are schooled in history, without noting the fact that this is partially the result of the left’s educational agenda and indoctrination from professors like himself, who present American history as a shameful parade of genocidal atrocities and ruthless imperialism. Current history books don’t provide the framework for understanding the American “empire,” Stone chimed in, adding that, like <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=939">Howard Zinn</a>’s subversive and ubiquitous <em>The People’s History of the United States</em>, “we’re trying to make this book a primer” for high school readers the age of his own daughter, 16-17. Their intention, of course, is to pollute young minds with their Blame America First mentality.</p>
<p>It is in the final minutes of the program that the participants begin to let their hair down and expose more radical opinions. Stone, for example, raises the specter of the so-called Red Scare: “Is it not convenient for the bosses, the owners, the elites, to deflect the tensions that exist in this era in American life by pointing to Stalin and the Communists and saying, ‘This is the enemy’?” He goes on to add that “Stalin has always been a convenient boogey man for the right and the center, the Trumanites, up to today.” Kazin responded by agreeing but added that the Communists, by their heinous actions, did give some legitimacy to the right’s concerns – which the right then used “to scare people,” Kuznick hastened to add. So Communist brutality and repression were real, but pointing it out was paranoid fear-mongering?</p>
<p>Stone joked about finding it insulting that airports were named after two aggressive anti-Communists, former Eisenhower Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and former President Ronald Reagan. Kazin and Kuznick laughed along with him and the latter added, “At least we got [the first black Supreme Court Justice] Thurgood Marshall in there in Baltimore.”</p>
<p>Kazin brought the conversation into the present by asking, “Has American foreign policy changed at all now since the Cold War?&#8230; Is the U.S. still seeing the world as its own oyster to be cracked open?” Kuznick and Stone share a knowing smile at this, as if they have a lot to say on the topic – Kuznick in particular looks like he’s bursting to respond – but Stone merely says, “You’re answering your own question.” He and Kuznick go on to lament “the lost opportunities” for peace, particularly during the presidencies of both Bushes.</p>
<p>“What kind of foreign policy do you think the United States <em>should</em> have?” Kazin asks. Stone asserts that the world he would like to live in is one of “compassion and a love of mankind, a global purpose – in Wallace’s phrase, a ‘century of the Common Man.’” But instead, “no one acts worse than we [in the U.S.] do because we don’t trust anybody.”</p>
<p>“Yeah, because we’ve got the power to enforce it,” blurts Kuznick. He proceeds to put forth statistics about America’s unequal share of the world’s wealth, then Stone finishes the discussion with more anti-American blather: “We are this fascist force in the universe for control… Are we gonna follow our conscience, our good sense, our heart? Or are we gonna follow our baser instincts?”</p>
<p>“That’s probably a good way to end,” Kazin quips, and the program abruptly comes to a close.</p>
<p>Actually, a good way to end would have been to hear a countervailing voice challenging the perverse notion of America as a “fascist force in the universe.” Radical historians like Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick see American greed, paranoia and imperialism as the source of all international inequity and animosity; what their <em>Untold History</em> does not tell is that, on balance, America has been a greater force for good in its short existence than any nation or power in history. They want us to be more trusting and cooperative with the very forces that seek our destruction; but what their <em>Untold History</em> does not tell is that America has had, and continues to have, existential enemies with their own power-grasping agendas. What <em>Untold History</em> does not tell is the whole truth.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Oliver Stone’s Cold War Melodrama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-cold-war-melodrama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oliver-stones-cold-war-melodrama</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 07 Jan 2013 04:30:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Showtime]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Soviet Union]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Truman]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A Hate-America documentary series blames the U.S. for Soviet expansionism. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-cold-war-melodrama/showposter/" rel="attachment wp-att-172365"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-172365" title="showposter" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/showposter.jpg" alt="" width="298" height="282" /></a><em>Editor’s note: The following is the fourth installment of a series of articles Frontpage is running in response to Oliver Stone’s neo-Communist documentary series, “The Untold History of the United States,” currently airing Mondays on Showtime. Frontpage will be reviewing each episode of the Stone series, exposing the leftist hateful lies about America and setting the record straight. Below is a review of Part 4 of Stone’s series.</em></p>
<p>Oliver Stone is the mastodon of the La Brea tar pits of left-wing ideology. In his movies over the years he has recycled stale left-wing narratives with all the nuance and complexity of a Soviet-era <em>Pravda</em> editorial. Now he has brought his agitprop gifts to cable television in the Showtime series “The Untold History of the United States.” In episode 4, “The Cold War: 1945-50,” Stone once again tells the fossilized and duplicitous tale of America’s greed and aggression against a Soviet Union that just wanted to get along with its war-time ally.</p>
<p>Those of a certain age will recognize the story Stone tells, for it was dominant among left-wingers all the way up to the day the Soviet Union collapsed into the dustbin of history, and still can be found among diehard true believers. In this rewriting of history, the Soviet Union had been a stalwart ally during World War II, bearing the brunt of the fight against Nazism and suffering 27,000,000 dead. In 1945, the possibility of continuing cooperation between the West and the Soviets was destroyed by America’s aim to use its overwhelming economic and military power to dominate the world and to destroy the socialist and communist challenges to its hegemony. Winston Churchill is one of the villains in this story. Eager as he was to maintain the British Empire, Churchill’s famous “iron curtain” speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri represented to Stone a “quantum leap in bellicosity” against the Soviets.</p>
<p>President Harry Truman also took a hard-line against the Soviet Union and the democratically elected communist parties in France and Italy, and in 1948 helped England to crush a “popular leftist” government in Greece. This aggression, camouflaged as the  “Truman Doctrine,” against a wartime ally was rationalized by propagating what Stone calls the false “image of the Soviet Union out to conquer the world.” In fact, Stone explains, the Soviets––“stunned” by Truman’s bellicosity–– were simply trying to rebuild their war-shattered country and alleviate its “crushing poverty,” defend their western borders against their historical enemy Germany, and seek the “warm water ports” necessary for their geopolitical interests. Ignoring these understandable needs, Truman bullied the Soviet Union, using nuclear blackmail to drive them from Iran, forcing Germany to cut off reparation payments, and continuing to test nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>Fearful of Truman’s imperialist expansionism, the Soviets responded to intervention in Greece with a coup in Hungary, and imposed on its Eastern European satellites a “new and stricter order,” as Stone euphemizes the brutal totalitarian regimes imposed on Eastern Europe. The hero in Stone’s tale is communist fellow traveler Henry Wallace, who “tried to put a stop to the growing madness,” but was spied upon and denigrated by the Truman administration, ending any chance of stopping the “nuclear arms race.” Yet fearful of the “Republican right,” Truman at home instituted surveillance of suspected “subversives,” demanded loyalty oaths, and investigated suspected communists in Hollywood and unions, thus pandering to the irrational fear of communism widespread among Americans vulnerable to the machinations of capitalist overlords. What followed this “red scare” were anti-communist propaganda in movies, and the “witch hunts” conducted by the FBI and CIA, “capitalism’s invisible army,” as Stone calls it.</p>
<p>So goes Stone’s melodrama, in which peace-loving Soviets are driven to occupation and subversion by the imperialist hegemonic ambitions of a United States eager to become the world’s dominant power in order to maximize capitalist profits. Every Soviet move is explained as a natural response to American provocations and aggression. Thus the Soviets overturned the Czech government and installed a puppet regime in 1948, a “purely defensive move,” Stone explains, because the Czech acceptance of Marshall aid was understandably seen as a tool of American penetration. This is the same stale apologetics for tyranny that I remember parroting in my left-wing callow youth, and it will only impress those who are as ignorant of historical fact as I was then. And it works, as most bad history does, by omitting inconvenient truths.</p>
<p>Take, for example, Stone’s central justifying assumption: the implication that the West’s fear of Soviet plans for “world domination” was a paranoid fantasy manipulated by the U.S. government to further its own ambitions to control the world. To believe this requires not only ignoring or explaining away, as Stone does, the decades of mass murder and brutal tyranny perpetrated by Soviet leaders in thrall to an expansionist ideology, but also forgetting the words of Soviet leaders themselves.</p>
<p>In fact, as the great historian of Soviet tyranny <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Ravaged-Century-Robert-Conquest/dp/0393320863/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1357497875&amp;sr=1-3&amp;keywords=robert+conquest">Robert Conquest</a> writes, “The Soviet assumption that all other political life-forms and beliefs were inherently and immutably hostile was the simple and central cause of [the] Cold War.” Thus there “was never any question of a permanent accommodation between the USSR and the ‘capitalist’ world.” Any “temporary relaxation, a reining back, of the ideology’s inherent expansionism” was strictly tactical, a delay made necessary by Soviet weakness, as in the period following World War II. As Stalin said in 1945, “We shall recover in fifteen or twenty years, and then we’ll have another go at it.” In that same year, Deputy Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, in response to ambassador Averell Harriman’s question what the West could do to satisfy Stalin, answered, “Nothing.” In 1946 Litvinov told a Western journalist that the “root cause” of the confrontation with the West was the view in Russia that such a conflict was “inevitable.”</p>
<p>The ultimate triumph of communism was the supreme goal of Soviet foreign policy, as codified by Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. In 1968––the year the Soviets brutally crushed the liberal democratic uprising in Czechoslovakia known as the Prague Spring––Gromyko said that “the range of our country’s international interests is not determined by its geographical position alone,” and “despite an acute situation, however far away it appears from our country, the Soviet Union’s reaction is to be expected in all capitals of the world.” Later in his 1975 book <em>The Foreign Policy of the Soviet Union</em>, Gromyko wrote, “The Communist Party subordinates all its theoretical and practical activities in the sphere of foreign relations to the task of strengthening the positions of socialism, and the interests of further developing and deepening the world revolutionary process.” So too General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, who said, “Our Party has always warned that in the ideological field there can be no peaceful coexistence” with capitalist countries. In 1972 he added regarding the policy of détente, “While pressing for the assertion of the principle of peaceful coexistence, we realize that successes in this important matter in no way signify the possibility of weakening our ideological struggle. On the contrary, we should be prepared for an intensification of this struggle and for its becoming an increasingly acute form of struggle between the two social systems.” This belief had been consistent with Soviet communism ever since Lenin proclaimed a necessary “series of frightful clashes” between communism and capitalism, and so cannot be explained away, as Stone attempts to do, as defensive reaction to American aggression.</p>
<p>It seems, then, that Stone’s paranoid anti-communists like Truman had a valid point, one confirmed by the extensive Soviet spying and subversion that in fact took place in America, as well as the violent subjection and oppression of other countries across the globe. It also explains the point made by historian Richard Pipes in 1975, and confirmed by documents from Soviet archives accessible after the regime’s collapse, that despite protests to the contrary, the Soviet regime was prepared to fight and win a nuclear war. As Soviet official V.V. Zagladin said in 1988, “Repudiating nuclear war and conducting an active struggle for peace, we nevertheless proceeded from the assumption of the possibility of victory in a possible conflict.” Conquest adds, “The Communist armies, as we now know, were on a very short notice for an invasion of West Germany, with the certainty of a tactical nuclear exchange. And military thinking in Moscow inclined to a view that nuclear war, while to be avoided, was winnable.” Given these beliefs, the U.S. aim to maintain superiority in armaments, derided at the time as a dangerous “arms race,” and to resist communist expansion across the globe were necessary for peace and American security.</p>
<p>This evidence of Soviet ideologically driven expansionism destroys the central assumption of Stone’s apologetic narrative: that the West overreacted irrationally against the understandable foreign policy interests of the Soviet Union, thus instigating reciprocal overreactions by the Soviets. Many other distortions of history, of course, riddle the film. The implication that the Soviet Union was a friendly ally during World War II is absurd. Stone neglects to mention that in August 1939 Stalin signed a treaty with Hitler and for nearly two years provided much needed resources to Germany until Hitler invaded Russia. Stalin became our ally on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and cooperated with the West not on principle but in order to survive and to receive much-needed aid. The explanation of Ukrainian resistance to the Soviets in 1948 as fueled by American subversion and support of fascists ignores the 5 million Ukrainians slaughtered by Stalin before the war during the terror-famine campaign of 1932-33. In his encomium to Henry Wallace, Stone doesn’t tell us that Wallace’s Progressive Party was mostly a creation of a Communist Party that took its money and marching orders from Moscow, and that Wallace’s candidacy according to one writer was “the closest the Soviet Union ever came to actually choosing a president of the United States.”</p>
<p>Stone’s film is a tired reprise of decades of apologetic revisionist history on the part of leftist radicals who subordinate truth to ideology. Yet we should not dismiss it as unimportant or without consequence. As John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr––two historians whose <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Denial-Historians-Communism-Espionage/dp/159403088X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1357498182&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=in+denial+haynes">studies</a> of Soviet archives provide the evidence of communist subversion ignored by Stone and others––write, “Communism as a social fact is dead. But communism as a pleasant figment of the ‘progressive’ worldview lives on, giving a phantom life to the illusions and historical distortions that sustained that murderous and oppressive ideology. The intellectual Cold War, alas, is not over. Academic revisionists who color the history of American communism in benign hues see their teaching and writing as the preparation of a new crop of radicals for the task of overthrowing American capitalism and its democratic constitutional order in the name of social justice and peace. Continuing to fight the Cold War in history, they intend to reverse the victory of the West and convince the next generation that the wrong side won, and to prepare the way for a new struggle.” In the age of Obama, this warning is more important than ever.</p>
<p><strong>Related articles on Stone’s series:</strong></p>
<p>1. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-left-wing-agitprop/">Bruce Thornton’s introduction</a> to this Frontpage series.</p>
<p>2. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-untrue-history-stalin-the-great-hero-of-wwii/">Matthew Vadum’s review</a> of Stone’s first episode.</p>
<p>3. Daniel Flynn&#8217;s review of &#8220;<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/through-oliver-stones-looking-glass/">Roosevelt, Truman and Wallace</a>,&#8221; the second episode.</p>
<p>4. Daniel Greenfield’s <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-atom-bomb-and-the-truth-bomb/">review of “The Bomb,”</a> the third episode.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Oliver Stone&#8217;s Left-Wing Agitprop</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-left-wing-agitprop/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oliver-stones-left-wing-agitprop</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Dec 2012 04:54:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peter Kuznick]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Untold History of the United States]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=169676</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Who controls the past controls the future.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-left-wing-agitprop/1002822_1_0_bsc01_444x250-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-169691"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-169691" title="1002822_1_0_bsc01_444x250" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/1002822_1_0_bsc01_444x250.jpg" alt="" width="266" height="198" /></a><em>Editor&#8217;s note: The following is an introduction written to a series of articles Frontpage will be running in the days ahead in response to Oliver Stone&#8217;s neo-Communist documentary series, &#8220;The Untold History of the United States,&#8221; currently airing Mondays on Showtime. Frontpage will be reviewing each episode of the Stone series, exposing the leftist hateful lies about America and setting the record straight. To see Daniel Greenfield&#8217;s  review of &#8220;The Bomb,&#8221; the third episode of the series, click <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-atom-bomb-and-the-truth-bomb/">here</a>. Stay tuned for more hard-hitting exposés of Stone&#8217;s distortions of U.S. history in the coming issues of Frontpage Magazine.<br />
</em></p>
<p>The American left has always lived by the slogan of “The Party” in Orwell’s <em>1984</em>: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” The politicizing of history in the academy has led to an ideologically distorted interpretation of American history that has trickled down into the K-12 curriculum, shaping the perceptions of generations of Americans, and determining how U.S. history is presented in popular culture. Oliver Stone’s 10-part “documentary” on the Cold War airing on the Showtime cable channel, “The Untold History of the United States,” is merely the latest version of American history presented as left-wing propaganda.</p>
<p>Despite Stone’s claim that this leftist story of American history has been “untold,” or, as he told London’s <em>Guardian</em>, that the “dirty story” of America has been “sanitized,” it has long been a ubiquitous, tired cliché. Indeed, even before Howard Zinn’s 1980 masterpiece of agitprop, <em>A People’s History of the United States</em>––which has sold over 2 million copies and is a staple of university and high school reading lists––the melodrama of American historical crimes and oppression was a staple of progressive received wisdom. Indeed, so entrenched is this narrative in American culture that purveyors of it like Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Oliver Stone––who is worth $50 million––have become rich peddling it. And contrary to Stone’s assertion that, though his version of the American story may have been “told” by “cutting edge” academic experts, it remains “unlearned” by students and the larger culture, some version of his view of history can be found in most American history textbooks from grade school to university. That’s why despising America for its historical crimes is an intellectual fashion marker, one of those things that everyone sophisticated and smart just knows, and that sets them apart from the mass of patriotic oafs who believe what Stone and his co-writer Peter Kuznick sneeringly deny––that America is “the world’s greatest nation.”</p>
<p>Why leftists like Stone hate America has long been obvious. The ability of free-market capitalism and liberal democracy to provide prosperity and personal freedom to an unprecedentedly large number of people has discredited the socialist and communist ideologies that have failed miserably and bloodily to achieve the extravagant utopian goals of the left. As Raymond Aron wrote in 1955, the left hates America because it “has succeeded by means which were not laid down in the revolutionary code. Prosperity, power, the tendency towards uniformity of economic conditions––these results have been achieved by private initiative, by competition rather than State intervention, in other words by capitalism, which every well-brought-up intellectual has been taught to despise.” Reinvigorating and promoting the socialist revolution thus requires slandering its most successful enemy. So too today, the rationale for those, like Barack Obama and Oliver Stone, who are eager to expand government power and control over society and the economy is found in what during his international “apology tour” Obama called America’s “arrogant, dismissive, derisive” behavior and the “darker periods in our history.” More political power is necessary for correcting and compensating for that oppressive record, and steering the locomotive of history back towards the internationalist leftist utopia.</p>
<p>But this leftist view of history results from facts and events evaluated in terms of some impossible utopian standard, instead of the record of how peoples and states have typically acted over time. As such it commits the mortal historiographical sin: presentism, the projection onto the past of contemporary standards, categories, and expectations. Thus the politically correct historian castigates the European and American violent collision with the Indians in the New World as a historically unprecedented crime, an act of  ”genocide” and a bloody stage of imperialist expansion. In historical reality, it was yet another instance of the major dynamic of world history: the migrations of people to obtain land, and the violent appropriation of it from those already there. Indeed, long before the coming of the white man, Indian tribes in America were violently seizing land from other tribes. For Indians, title was conferred by force, not by documents, as the Oglala Sioux chief Black Hawk said at a conference with the U.S. cavalry in 1851: “These lands once belonged to the Kiowa and the Crows, but we whipped those nations out of them, and in this we did what the white men do when they want the lands of the Indians.” Perhaps you can argue Americans should have known better, but then you’d have to admit they <em>are</em> better in some respect, something the America-hater vehemently denies.</p>
<p>Or we hear a lot about American slavery, as though it too was a historically unique phenomenon. But slavery has been universal among humans, with the exception of those peoples or tribes not strong enough to enslave others. What is remarkable is not the existence of slavery, but the rise of an anti-slavery movement that convinced people slavery was morally wrong, a movement powerful enough to spark in the United States a civil war in which 650,000 Americans died. It is the exceptions in American history that we need to study and acknowledge, not just the endless recitation of sins common among mankind. And even when judging those “crimes and misfortunes” of history, as Voltaire put it, we must locate them in the context of what humans over time have typically done. We must define our standard of judgment and be clear where that standard comes from. For genuine historians, the standard comes from the record of human behavior over time. For Stone and his ilk, the standard is a utopian one that no human society, comprising as it must flawed human beings, will ever live up to.</p>
<p>From that impossible perspective, then, history can be only a lurid melodrama of cardboard heroes and villains. For the left, this means defining “villain” in Marxist-Leninist terms. Hence leftists obsess over “imperialism,” a word that communist ideologues transformed into a crude smear. It has become one of what historian Robert Conquest calls  “mind-blockers and thought-extinguishers,” the function of which is “mainly to confuse, and of course to replace, the complex and needed process of understanding with the simple and unneeded process of inflammation.” “Imperialism” automatically denotes a self-evident evil, so all we have to do is attach the label to the United States in order to signify its oppression and exploitation.</p>
<p>But once again, the absence of intellectual precision and a reasonable standard of comparison leads to simplistic and misleading interpretations of historical events. Just say “imperialism” and you can reinterpret the Cold War against Soviet communist expansion as the pretext for America’s global power-grab. Of course, you have to ignore the fact that no careful historian would call America an “empire,” nor simplify its military action abroad into “imperialism.” And to call the Cold War camouflage for imperialist expansion is to ignore the massive amounts of evidence––much of it available even before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 released definitive evidence from Soviet archives––that the communist superpower was actively subverting other countries through violence and espionage in order to expand its empire and to bring about the triumph of communism.</p>
<p>Equally important, any fair comparison of the United States’ behavior to that of other countries enjoying such overwhelming military and economic power will show that America has been remarkable not for its excesses, but for its restraint. What other country has spent billions rehabilitating a defeated foe, as the U.S. did after World War II, or providing humanitarian and foreign aid? Does Stone think the Romans would have honored the sort of rules of engagement or limitations on air power that the United States has demonstrated in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? They would have made a desert and called it peace. Or has there been any other country that has welcomed in foreigners, and then allowed them to slander and vilify the very people who have given them freedom and opportunity? What other country allows its citizens not just to voice slanted and false criticisms of it, but to get rich doing it? This restraint and openness have sometimes been a consequence of tactical or pragmatic calculations, but they also reflect the foundational principles of the American political order and its commitment to freedom and individual rights.</p>
<p>The story that needs telling, then, is not the story of America’s sins, which have been the sins of an imperfect humanity found in every time and every place. We have heard that story over and over for the last half-century. The story we should be hearing is the story of America’s exceptional virtues, the dedication to personal freedom and rights that, no matter how often betrayed in the past, today remains a monument to those virtues. As the stale clichés of left-wing history saturating our culture and schools show, that’s the real “untold” and “unlearned” story of America.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Preserving Cold War History</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/preserving-cold-war-history/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=preserving-cold-war-history</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Dec 2012 04:41:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Lenin]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Wende Museum]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Stepping into the world behind the Iron Curtain.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/preserving-cold-war-history/coldwar/" rel="attachment wp-att-168756"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-168756" title="coldwar" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/coldwar-450x299.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="179" /></a>Recently I attended a private fundraising event at the <a href="http://www.wendemuseum.org/">Wende Museum</a> in Culver City in the Los Angeles area. The Wende website describes it as “a collections-based research and education institute that preserves Cold War artifacts and history, making resources available to scholars and applying historical lessons of the past to the present.” A Cold War museum in the heart of the entertainment world – who knew?</p>
<p>Incorporated in Los Angeles ten years ago, the Wende was founded by young historian Justinian “Justin” Jampol to address the rampant destruction of Cold War artifacts in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall (<em>wende</em> is German for “turning point,” a phrase often used to refer to that historic event and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union). “Evidence of this critical period in world history is quickly disappearing,” <a href="http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&amp;int_new=49259">said</a> Jampol. So he made it his mission to collect and preserve that evidence.</p>
<p>The result is an amazing collection of over 70,000 artifacts, archives and personal histories from Communist-era Eastern Europe, including furniture, paintings, sculptures, posters, flags, signs, political propaganda, clothing, tapestries, books, films, electronics, remnants of Checkpoint Charlie, and the longest stretch of the original Berlin Wall outside of Germany. Nearly 75% of the objects in that collection originate from the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The Wende uses the history and culture of the GDR as a “lens through which to observe the larger cultural implications of Cold War-era Eastern European and the Soviet Union.”</p>
<p>Jampol led those of us at the fundraiser on a tour through the small display rooms and a crowded downstairs warehouse packed to the gills with these items. We were also shown through a nearby building which houses a collection of Cold War-era surveillance equipment. The collection gives off a palpable sense of the oppressive history to which it bears witness.</p>
<p>The Wende Museum won’t have to endure cramped quarters much longer. The city council has just given it a 75-year lease in a high-visibility building near Sony Studios in Culver City. Not only that, but the museum will get a higher profile as the subject of <a href="http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&amp;int_new=49259">an upcoming book</a> from the major art publisher Taschen. Wayne Ratkovich, Chair of The Wende Museum Board, notes that “the book will present more than just an exhaustive documentation of The Wende&#8217;s collection and the artifacts of the Cold War. It will provide a unique view of life behind the Iron Curtain.”</p>
<p>The Museum focuses on pivotal moments in Cold War history – “beginnings, endings and transformative events” – such as the formation of the Warsaw Pact, the fall of the Berlin Wall, German reunification, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the evolution of former Communist countries to members of a pan-European union. But the Wende also recognizes history on a more personal level, as preserved through oral histories and material remnants like family photo albums, scrapbooks and home movies, to “explore the layered realities of everyday life behind the Iron Curtain,” the “symbols, rituals, mass organizations and state-approved creative expression generated across the region,” and “the ways that official ideology was subverted, rejected and given new meaning in the private sphere.”</p>
<p>The Museum serves as an unparalleled educational resource not only for insight into the Eastern perspective of the Cold War, but the legacy of the Cold War and its contemporary relevance as well. Jampol is always searching for unique, interdisciplinary ways to engage audiences, such as urban landscape projects, online tools, exhibitions that provide access to shared knowledge, and a wiki-catalog that allows the public to contribute to the creation of artifacts and to upload videos and other content. In addition, “We host an annual conference or workshop for international scholars and students, loan materials to museum and institutions around the world, and produce and publish research projects,” <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/08/cold-war-relics-the-wende-museum-saves-communist-design/243464/">he says</a>.</p>
<p>Organized by journalist/historian David Stein, who also heads up an organization of counterculture conservatives called the <a href="http://www.countercontempt.com/">Republican Party Animals</a> (“this is not your father’s GOP”), the fundraising event featured the city council has just given it a 75-year lease on a high-visibility building by Downtown Culver City, near Sony Studios.talk radio host Larry Elder among the speakers, as well as the prolific journalist/novelist/screenwriter Michael Walsh, who happens to be on the museum’s Board of Directors. Walsh shared some of his personal experiences in Berlin while writing for <em>Time</em> magazine and other publications at that time (I have interviewed him about his thriller novels for FrontPage Mag <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2011/mark-tapson/shock-warning-an-interview-with-michael-walsh-2/">here</a>, and reviewed his recent Encounter broadside <a href="http://www.amazon.com/People-v-Democratic-Party/dp/1594036616/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1342849458&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+people+vs+the+democratic+party"><em>The People v. The Democratic Party</em></a> <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/the-people-v-the-democratic-party/">here</a>).</p>
<p>U.S. Navy Commander J.E. Dyer also spoke to the capacity crowd at the event. Having served in Naval Intelligence from 1983 through 2004, beginning her career under Ronald Reagan and finishing it serving in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, Commander Dyer has written for <em>The Weekly Standard</em>, <em>HotAir</em>, <em>Commentary</em>, and elsewhere, and is working on a book about Ronald Reagan, whom she quoted several times in her brief presentation. “Reagan saw the Cold War as a battle for the hearts and minds of people,” Dyer pointed out, and she quoted from his 1987 “tear down that wall” address about that struggle:</p>
<blockquote><p>After these four decades there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor.</p></blockquote>
<p>And so it was. The Berlin Wall came down two years after that famous speech, because, to paraphrase another Dyer quote from Reagan’ 1982 address on arms reduction, he demonstrated the will to rebuild America’s strength and force the Soviets to back down.</p>
<p>The arrival in movie theaters of <em>Red Dawn</em>, a remake of the Cold War cult favorite of the same name, has given reviewers occasion to trot out a tired but favorite phrase of the left: “Cold War paranoia,” a dismissive term which implies that the threat of Soviet Communism was only a chimeric obsession of jingoistic conservatives. Justinian Jampol and his Cold War museum are working diligently to preserve the evidence of the War’s oppressive reality in Eastern Europe.</p>
<p><em>Mark Tapson, a Hollywood-based writer and screenwriter, is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He focuses on the politics of popular culture.</em></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>&#8216;Skyfall&#8217; Returns to &#8216;Bond&#8217; Roots</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dr-joseph-a-yeager/skyfall-returns-to-bond-roots/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=skyfall-returns-to-bond-roots</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 19 Nov 2012 04:30:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dr. Joseph A. Yeager]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[New movie is a gift to Brits who still love Queen and country. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dr-joseph-a-yeager/skyfall-returns-to-bond-roots/skyfall_11_h/" rel="attachment wp-att-165689"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-165689" title="Skyfall_11_h" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Skyfall_11_h-450x321.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="225" /></a>Quantum of Solace, the 22nd film in the venerable James Bond series, was arguably the most innovative of them all. Rejecting the ethos that defined Bond’s universe from Ian Fleming&#8217;s Casino Royale, published in 1953, to its cinematic incarnation in 2006, Quantum of Solace presented a bleak, manichean view of geopolitics wherein a greedy West, with willing assistance from a shadowy organization called Quantum, plundered an innocent and helpless third world. There were bows to Marxism, broadsides against capitalism, and shots across the bridge of the CIA.</p>
<p>Suffice it to say Quantum of Solace wore its cynical politics on its sleeve. A red sleeve.</p>
<p>But the ideology of the politics was less innovative than their mere introduction.</p>
<p>Bond films had always been notable for their apolitical tone. Born in 1962, the very apogee of the Cold War, Bond films nevertheless largely steered clear of political shoals. Yes, James Bond, the &#8220;Queen&#8217;s loyal terrier,&#8221; was basically patriotic and the Soviet Union was sometimes obliquely depicted as inimical, but by the standards of the age, politics were conspicuously muted.</p>
<p>That all changed with Quantum of Solace. And it changed in a postcolonial, postmodern manner that would not have pleased founding producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, let alone Ian Fleming, the man who authored it all.</p>
<p>Longstanding Bond observers surely wondered, had current producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, under the influence of Paul Haggis and Marc Forster, permanently turned James Bond against queen and country? (Historian <a href="http://www.juancole.com/2008/11/quantum-of-anti-imperialism.html">Juan Cole</a> gleefully suggested something to that effect.)</p>
<p>But Skyfall, the follow-up to Quantum of Solace, answers the query with a thunderous no.</p>
<p>Skyfall’s plot, for the film’s first half, is murky and nebulous. We learn that villains of some sort have acquired a list of Western agents embedded in terrorist organizations around the globe. We see those agents exposed, to mortal effect, on Youtube. And we witness a bomb blast at MI6 headquarters. But as they used to say in old England, what was it all in aid of?</p>
<p>The shroud is lifted after agent 007 and his MI6 cohort capture arch-foe Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) and extradite him to the UK. Under interrogation, Silva relates his past as an MI6 agent in Hong Kong where, under orders from intelligence chief M (Judi Dench), he was hung out to dry, captured by the Chinese and tortured forte et dure. Silva attempted suicide by crushing a cyanide capsule lodged in a tooth, but the poison, rather than kill its consumer, merely scarred and disfigured him, physically and mentally.</p>
<p>Silva then, unhinged by the experience, has himself become a cyberterrorist bent on murdering M and destroying the organization she controls. From this point on, Skyfall offers a chiseled, linear and straightforward quest for revenge by Silva, coupled to James Bond’s exhaustive and frenzied efforts to thwart and destroy the malign shade of missions past.</p>
<p>Director Sam Mendes realizes the tale at a very high level. While Skyfall drags slightly in the middle, the tension and suspense mount exponentially and resolve in a slam-bang ending that is equal parts action and tragedy. The post-climax coda is a bittersweet and valedictory brew tinctured with optimistic revivification. It all packs a whipsawing wallop of conflicting emotions calculated to leave the audience with a certain sense of pride and good cheer.</p>
<p>Skyfall is a beautifully crafted film. Its cinematography, in contrast to that of Quantum of Solace, leans to the beautiful and the picturesque. Aerial shots of Shanghai at night are breathtaking and contrast powerfully with the stark Scottish landscape where the final pitched battle occurs.</p>
<p>The editing is old school. Contra Quantum of Solace, scenes unfold in a leisurely manner and cameras linger. Even the action sequences, jolting as they are, nevertheless do not disorient through rapid-fire, chaotic edits, as they did in Skyfall’s predecessor.</p>
<p>Acting in Skyfall is top-class. Daniel Craig, already the last word in Bondian toughness, manages to ratchet up his hard-bitten masculinity yet another notch.</p>
<p>Bardem’s Silva will go down in Bond lore as the creepiest villain in series history to date. Silva is an entirely different personality from No County for Old Men’s legendary Anton Chiguhr, but inspires a similar unease and dread.</p>
<p>The criminally underutilized Berenice Marlohe, in the role of distressed dame Severine, delivers a quirkily spellbinding performance. Her giddily terrified interchange with Bond in a Macao casino may be the highlight of the film.</p>
<p>Dame Judi Dench, in her final—and most extensive—turn as M, departs on a note that will draw attention from Oscar voters. She is careworn and fragile, yet also pugnacious and determined. It is an appealing and highly sympathetic performance that sets the audience up for heartbreak rarely realized so powerfully in action and adventure films.</p>
<p>But Skyfall’s unmistakable rejection of the astigmatic pathos and the pernicious self-loathing found in Quantum of Solace is what defines this film.</p>
<p>Skyfall is unabashedly patriotic. Bond, confronted by a mocking Silva, cockily tosses his love of country in the villain’s face. Union Jacks fly. The English bulldog, the four-legged twin of Winston Churchill and talismanic symbol of British tenacity, features prominently. Hence, a ceramic bulldog improbably survives the explosion in M’s MI6 office. M wills the bulldog to Bond. When Bond unwrapped M’s symbolic bequest, the audience in my west Texas theatre erupted in cheers and applause. One can only imagine the response in England itself.</p>
<p>Skyfall venerates tradition and it honors the aged. Bond is twice labeled old-fashioned and on both occasions accepts the jibe as a badge of pride. Judi Dench, the septuagenarian warhorse, is every bit as heroic as Bond himself. What’s more, she pairs with an equally elderly Kincade (Albert Finney) at Bond’s childhood home (named Skyfall), as silver tigers pitched against Silva and his battalion of young cyber-savages. The homage to a generation rapidly disappearing is as touching as it is unthinkable had Quantum of Solace been the template for future Bond films.</p>
<p>Skyfall is an archaizing, historically literate Bond film. The Reformation is mentioned in the context of Bond’s childhood estate of Skyfall. Winston Churchill is referenced when MI6, hoping to avoid another attack from Silva, relocates to the ancient subterranean passages of London. M quotes verses from Tennyson. Adele’s portentous title track could have been written for Shirley Bassey or Nancy Sinatra. Bond pulls his 1964 Aston Martin out of mothballs to spirit M away to Skyfall. He shaves—and is shaved—with a straight razor. The new Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) states that sometimes the old ways are better. Bond’s most technologically sophisticated gadget is a radio transmitter. A monocle and a trilby would not have gone amiss.</p>
<p>This film, much like Fleming’s novels published in austere, post-war Great Britain, is powerful medicine for British spirits at low ebb. Skyfall suggests that Great Britain’s past should not be scorned and reviled. On the contrary, there is much in the nation’s history and traditional culture that should be admired and even revived. For a people steeped in the rituals of masochistic flagellation, Skyfall is a corrective absolution. It is a gift to the people of the United Kingdom.</p>
<p>The 23<sup>rd</sup> instantiation of cinematic James Bond leaves the series with a new roster of dramatis personae. In addition to the above-mentioned Harris in the role of Moneypenny, Ralph Fiennes moves into Dench’s seat as M, and Ben Whishaw revives the role of Q made famous by Desmond Llewellyn. James Bond is thus recharged, rearmed and poised to extend his astonishing half-century run. It’s not out of the question that he could outlive the nation that gave him birth. Then again, the new, old James Bond offers hints for how to revive and prolong Britannia. It is up to the Brits to listen.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Collapse of Communism: The Untold Story</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/the-collapse-of-communism-the-untold-story/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-collapse-of-communism-the-untold-story</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Oct 2012 04:45:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[deceit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[documentary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[West]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=147208</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new documentary unearths the uncomfortable truths that explain the dark forces on our horizon.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/doc.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-147211" title="doc" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/doc.jpg" alt="" width="320" height="464" /></a>Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Robert Buchar, an associate professor and author of the Cinematography Program at Columbia College in Chicago. A political refugee from former Czechoslovakia, he is the producer of the documentary, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Velvet-Hangover-Robert-Buchar/dp/B003BEE7FG/ref=sr%201%202?ie=UTF8&amp;s=dvd&amp;qid=1268876876&amp;sr=8-2"><em>Velvet Hangover</em></a>, which is about Czech New Wave filmmakers, how they survived the period of “normalization” and their reflections on the so-called Velvet Revolution of 1989. He is also the author of  <a href="http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-1720-9">Czech New Wave Filmmakers in Interviews</a> and <a href="http://www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/AndRealityBeDamned.html"><em>And Reality be Damned… Undoing America: What The Media Didn’t Tell You About the End of the Cold War and Fall of Communism in Europe.</em></a> He just currently finished the new feature length documentary film<span style="text-decoration: underline;">, </span><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://www.collapseofcommunism.com/store/"><em>The Collapse of Communism: The Untold Story</em></a></span>.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Robert Buchar, welcome to Frontpage Interview. Congratulations on your new documentary film.</p>
<p><strong>Buchar:</strong> Thank you Jamie for the opportunity to talk about it.<strong> </strong> It took eight years to finish but it’s finally done.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Let us begin with this question: Why should we talk about the fall of communism? Why does it matter?</p>
<p><strong>Buchar: </strong>Right, why talk about something that happened some 23 years ago? The word communism is even in our vocabulary anymore and the new generation has no idea what it even means.</p>
<p>And yet, communism eliminated over 100 million people during seventy years of its existence. That’s enough bodies to cover the equator of our planet when placing bodies side by side. When communism ‘collapsed’ in 1989, the media never raised the question of where those responsible for all the atrocities were. We didn’t hear anyone in the media asking where all the communists disappeared to.</p>
<p>Should we really believe that millions of communists just became overnight capitalists and good citizens? Surprise! They turned out to become leaders of the new system. It doesn’t matter what political party in the former Soviet satellite countries you are looking at, left or right, they all were created and are run by former communists.</p>
<p>So communism didn’t really disappear, it didn’t go away. It just adapted, morphed into the new system in order to survive and to continue on its mission.</p>
<p>As a result, the West now has to live with the consequences of its own naiveté.  And we don’t have to go to too far to see what I am talking about. Just look what is going on in America.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> So did the Cold War really end? Who won?</p>
<p><strong>Buchar: </strong>It depends who you ask. According to some people on the left, the Cold War never existed. They believe it was just our own propaganda. Conservatives believe they won the Cold War and unfortunately they will never accept the perestroika deception for one simple reason—they would have to give up the credit for the victory they proclaimed and acknowledge they were wrong.</p>
<p>There are really very few people in America who believe that the West lost the Cold War. But how will you then explain that after the ‘fall of communism’ that socialism is on the rise around the globe? The international terrorism, seeded and supported by KGB, almost ceased to exist after the disintegration of the Soviet Union but then in 1996 it exploded again in the new form of Islamic terror and the anti-Americanism became peoples’ favored pastime everywhere you look.</p>
<p>While the West declared the victory and the end of Cold War, the struggle with Moscow’s deception machine didn’t end. On the contrary, it intensified. Chekists are still in charge. The West did exactly what KGB strategists anticipated: it lowered its guard, eliminated the counter intelligence, landed Russia millions of dollars and accepted them as equal partners.  It doesn’t hurt to remind you that the CIA Chief for the Soviet block countries at that time was Aldrich Aims and all our spies in Moscow were executed with the exception of one, Oleg Gordievsky. He was the British agent and he talks about it all of this in my film.</p>
<p>Also, keep in mind how the person in charge of supplying millions of dollars to Russia that disappeared in a magic black hole, Marc Rich, was pardoned in the last minute by President Bill Clinton. He is now living who knows where. The CIA and MI6 officials both agree that KGB/FSB spying now is higher than ever.</p>
<p>So it doesn’t matter how we call it—the continuing Cold War, Cold War 2—the Chekists quest for the world domination goes on. And it will go on as long as Chekists will be in charge in Kremlin.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What do the American people know about the current political system and economy in the former Soviet satellites countries?  Why they should know and care?</p>
<p><strong>Buchar: </strong>American people know very little or nothing about this. They are busy shopping and entertaining themselves. They have no idea about foreign forces shaping their lives. And if you mention it to them they look at you with disbelief.</p>
<p>When I finished the manuscript of my book <em>And Reality be Damned…</em> I handed it to my colleague in Chicago to get a feedback. His response was: “To accept what’s in your book I would have to give up everything I believed all my life.”</p>
<p>Americans don’t like to hear a bad news and as a result they will get hit hard. There is a saying “You will know what you had only after you lose it.” But in this case it may be too late. There is too much in stake. People can’t put current events in context because they are ignore history and thus can’t learn from it.</p>
<p>Back in 2005, I wanted to interview for my film comrade Rudolf Hegenbart. He was one of the Czech Communist Party Politburo officials, chief of Department 13, in charge of overseeing the transformation, including supervising dissidents. He declined my request because after Vaclav Havel became the President, he was warned by Havel’s people that if he would ever talk he will end up in the bag on the bottom of Slapy dam.</p>
<p>Anyway, after I published my book, he wrote me the letter saying: “Your book is historically important. Your information is correct. We were lectured about all that stuff when I studied in Moscow.” But when you tell Americans that the quest to destroy the capitalist America started in 1922 shortly after the Comintern was established in Moscow they think you should see psychiatrist.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> One would think that Marxism/socialism would be discredited by now, after all of the pathetic failure, carnage, genocide and misery they have called. And yet, they are on the rise now. Tell us how and why.</p>
<p><strong>Buchar: </strong>Very good question. It is something that has bothered me for a long time. One college student in my film says: “I think that if communism is done right, it could work.”</p>
<p>The idea of communism/socialism always was and still is attractive to purely educated and economically disadvantaged masses. People love nice dreams. There is an old communist propaganda slogan: “Everybody will get what they need.” I remember we were taught at school that under communism, cars will be parked everywhere in streets and if you will need one to drive, you will just pick one.</p>
<p>There is that never-ending propaganda/deception. The goal is not exactly to install socialism, but to disturb and destroy western democracy, specifically in America. <em>The Communist Manifesto</em> still sells very well on Amazon. Nikita Khrushchev said to Vice President Richard Nixon back in 1959:</p>
<blockquote><p>“You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism. We won’t fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy until you’ll fall like overripe fruit into our hands.”</p></blockquote>
<p>And here we are getting pretty close to that point. The biggest problem as I see it is that the left has the clear goal, the long term strategy, and it has a well established network around the globe. They are well organized, disciplined and devoted to achieve their goal under any circumstances. Conservatives, on the other hand, have no goal or strategy.</p>
<p>They are more individual-oriented. Blinded by political correctness, they can hardly agree on what their enemy is and because of that they can never come up with a successful counter-strategy.</p>
<p>The only way out of this magic circle is education; to show people what they can’t find in mainstream media and are not told at schools. And we are talking about information that is by no means classified. When you ask anyone today about the Venona intercepts, Solo files, Soviet Comintern and so on, they have no clue, never heard of it. When I started shooting my documentary, there was no interest about this topic at all.</p>
<p>Since I published my book <a href="http://www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/AndRealityBeDamned.html"><em>And Reality be Damned…</em></a> a bunch of very interesting books came out. There is Paul Kengor’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Communist-Paul-Kengor/dp/1451698097/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1349367718&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=communist"><em>The Communist</em></a><em>,</em> Pavel Stroylov’s  <a href="http://www.junepress.com/coverpic.asp?BID=805"><em>Allegations</em></a>, or yours <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_13?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&amp;field-keywords=high+moon+for+america&amp;sprefix=high+moon+for%2Cstripbooks%2C278"><em>High Noon for America: The Coming Showdown</em></a> &#8212; just to name a few. When you look at the history, democracy is very young and fragile. It has to be carefully maintained and it can’t successfully function in an uneducated, confused society. Once people start to cast their vote based on a feeling, personal appearance of the candidate, his race or religious beliefs, the whole nation will become just one dysfunctional family—a perfect brewing condition for pushing the idea of socialism or other form of dictatorship on them.</p>
<p>By the way, to install socialism doesn’t require the majority to make it happen. Revolutions are usually started and run by a strongly committed minority and pathetic or manipulated masses just help it happen.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Why do you think Western intelligence and governments can’t grasp the concept of disinformation?</p>
<p><strong>Buchar: </strong>Deception is an alien concept for the Western culture.  Joseph Douglass and Bill Gertz talk about this issue in my film. According to them our intelligence establishment had a very primitive, even wrong understanding of what deception represents. Only with the deception of Anatoliy Golitsyn did they get an opportunity to see the whole picture, but they blew it anyway. They refused to accept information he presented to them.</p>
<p>Bill Gertz talks about the anti-anti-communist mindset of the CIA. Pete Bagley told me that only after the Cold War ended did he realize that all CIA operations in Poland were set up by the KGB to get rid of the opposition. The fact that opposition in communist countries was actually ‘controlled opposition’ is hard to swallow to people living in democracy. When I defected from Czechoslovakia in 1980 I was debriefed twice. First in Austria, and then in the US. I was never asked any question I would consider significant. In 2005, one CIA official asked me how did I enjoy the broadcast of Radio Free Europe.</p>
<p>He was surprised when I told him that this broadcast was heavily jammed and it was impossible to listen to.</p>
<p>The CIA simply had no idea what was going on behind the Iron Curtain. They didn’t pay any attention to ideology and propaganda. They were only interested in military related information. So, because of that, they ‘missed the train.’ Finally, the upcoming book <em>‘Disinformation’ </em>by Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa and Ronald Rychlak will bring this extremely important issue to the public. Let’s hope that in the last minute, Americans will realize they were taken for a ride. The train is picking up the speed and we can only hope that we are not on a runaway train already.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Why is it important for people to watch your new film, <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://www.collapseofcommunism.com/store/"><em>The Collapse of Communism: The Untold Story</em></a></span>?</p>
<p><strong>Buchar: </strong>Many Americans today are not happy with the direction their country is heading in. They are wondering why the progressive movement got so strong, moving the country to become another big EU. The history and the growth of the leftist movement in the United States are well documented—even not so much known—but the spread of socialism in the United States is not just an internal issue. To fully understand what is going on in America today we need to know where the conquest to destroy our way of life was seeded, by whom, and what is their strategy.</p>
<p>For five years I have been interviewing intelligence experts, dissidents, defectors and Cold Warriors. What I discovered was an altogether different reality. The United States is heading for trouble and the key to understand it in all its complexity is to learn what really happened in the period 1989 and 1991. As we near the final destination of a so-called New World Order it is very important to realize who planned this journey. Is it possible that political establishment in the West simply doesn’t want to know the truth?</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Robert Buchar, thank you for joining us and thank you for making this film and for your dedication to the truth.</p>
<p>We encourage all of our readers to see this new film and to visit <a href="http://www.collapseofcommunism.com">collapseofcommunism.com</a>.</p>
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